SELECT on INT (and other) intermitantly fails

[Joelle Tegwen]

So last week I had a problem (I thought) with updates not happening, but really the problem was that the WHERE clause was returning no records.

After a fair bit of trial and error testing I found out that the problem was with the integer column. So say the table looks like this:

TableID VARCHAR(255)
UserID INT(10)
InputID INT(10)
Answer LONGTEXT
Updated DATETIME
WorksheetID VARCHAR(255)

IF I run: SELECT TableID FROM myTable WHERE WorksheetID='myWorksheetID' AND InputID=5
I get no rows returned even though that record is in the table.
If I ask for a different record: SELECT TableID FROM myTable WHERE WorksheetID='myWorksheetID' AND InputID=1 then I do get a record

So I did a test and I created a new column
temp INT and I copied the data from InputID into that column. Then I ran
SELECT TableID FROM myTable WHERE WorksheetID='myWorksheetID' AND temp=5
and it returned the desired record.

So then I tried changing the InputID field to type INT and running the query and I still get no records.

I tried changing the data type in a new import and I wasn't able to do so. (or figure out how)

Why is this a problem? My understanding is that the (10) is just a mask, it doesn't actually affect the data.
Is this a bug? How do I make the import tool migrate these long ints correctly?

I couldn't find anything on this but searching for "data type" and "access" on the web is a mostly futile endeavor.

Thanks
Joelle