You know, I’ve worked in IT for over twenty years, did everything from admin to programming, and I KNOW why these things sometimes happen. A working computer is a complex system with many components, software layers and protocols, so sometimes something unexpectedly screws up. Why big companies like MS (and all the other ususal suspects, I’m looking at you, Android/Google) don’t do more to get rid of these quirks though is another story.
The order is usually determined by whichever app last opened a window, so if Access and the other prog are both shuffling the windows and such they have open, that’d happen… UNLESS you pin their icons. What’s wrong with pinning it, again? If you keep it open all day anyway, it’s already in your task bar and wouldn’t add another entry there; it’d just keep them in place, in order (if you pin both). And if you close the programs they shrink down to their bare icons, which only use a tiny portion of your taskbar, left of all the running programs.
Are you sure that wouldn’t work?