Workitem Disappeared

[Thaddeus> <Gorbal]

Dear Workflowers,
 
I have a production problem:
 
      A user (user-1) has attempted to release an invoice with an invoice
     type for which he was not authorized by executing a work item.  That
     attempt was rejected by the system due to lack of authorization, but
     the work item was removed from other agent Inboxes.
     Another user (user-2) who is authorized to process that particular
     invoice cannot access that work item because it is not in his box
     anymore, after user-1 attempt to process it.
     To release that workitem to other agents user-1 executed the 'replace'
     command on that item, but that did not do the trick.  Not only that
     workitem was not released for the other agents but it also disappeared
     from the user-1 WI list.
 
We are in 4.5B and have just applied some hot packs to the system.
 
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,
Thad