Actual Work that is submitted by the local resources may be lost when you synchronize a project that uses Protected Actuals and local resources in Project 2003

When you synchronize a project that uses Protected Actuals and local resources in Microsoft Office Project 2003, Actual Work that is submitted by the local resources may be lost.

This problem is fixed in Microsoft Office Project 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Notes about the hotfix

• Published assignments maintain their current behavior. That is, when you synchronize to protect actual work, actual work is changed to reflect the actual work that is reported by the resource in Microsoft Project Web Access.
• Information in unpublished assignments is not removed. That is, Actual Work and other information that is submitted by the project manager is retained and copied into the Protected Actual Work field.
• To prevent the synchronization process from overwriting actual work values for local resources even if the assignment is published, the project manager can edit the setting that specifies if a particular assignment is published. You must do this on a per-assignment basis. To do this, follow these steps:
  1. On the View menu, click Resource Usage.
  2. On the Insert menu, click Column, and then insert the Confirmed field.
  3. Change the value in the Confirmed field from Yes to No for each task that you not want to synchronize.
• This hotfix only affects local resources. Enterprise resources will not be affected by this hotfix.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
This problem was first corrected in Project 2003 Service Pack 1.