You might try the iSeries client access driver provided by IBM.  We have always had better results using that one.  Although, we don't use Access and have never tried to "link"...

I've run into the same problem with bringing UNICODE data over from an iSeries DB2 database.  Here's how I ended up handling it:

On the data flow task, I have a...

We have had similar problems.  We ended up using the ".NET Providers\ODBC Data Provider" type of connection.  Then in the Data Flow task, we use a DataReader source to get...