I see your point.....

My thought was that if a user did not necessarily have sysadmin rights but still had rights to take a database offline, that the act of bringing it back online would imply an ability to at least browse the structure. The fact that the initial poster said the database was listed but couldn't be expanded until it was taken offline and then brought back online put me in that direction.

Something else that tweaked my interest was the ability to take the database offline and online without an error stating the .mdf wasn't available.

Now I see and understand your train of thought. Could this be resolved by a delayed start of the SQL Server service on a server restart? This is not a problem I have seen before (if this is actually the solution!) so I would be really interested in how it is resolved.