Can A Rollback Be Delayed?

Hi all, thanks for reading.

Bit of a puzzler...

A customer of ours has reported a intermittent error using one of our applications to receive some stock.

Under normal circumstances the application updates about 10 tables in a single transaction, inserting to some, updating others. After the stock receipt they print off a Crystal report against the receipt data.

The customer is saying that (very) occasionally they perform a receipt (no errors) and print off the report (no problems) yet when they come to access the data some time later it is almost as if no receipt has been made.

I have seen their data and can see what they mean. None of the expected data updates seem to have taken place. And yet there is the report sat there, indicating that it must have...

Looking closely at the data I can see breaks in the sequencing in certain identity column-carrying tables, during the period when the stock receipt was made. To all intents and purposes, therefore, it looks as though a rollback has occurred.

Is this possible? Could a Crystal report show uncommitted data which is then rolled back? How 'long' can a rollback take? Can it be initiated in some other way?

NB: We have done all the obvious things like:
- checking they have received against the correct DB;
- checking that no app or procedure can remove data in this way.
- verified that the report is reporting from the correct place.
etc.

The 'missing' data is so perfectly removed, my instinct says it must be a rollback but I can't see how this can be (yet).

All suggestions gratefully received - how could I track down whether this was occurring? Or is it my fevered imagination?

Many thanks!!!!

pmb

ps: According to our records, this customer is running SQL 7 SP3.