This would be awesome for when someone leaves our company too. It would be great to be able to have a list of all items shared with the user and then be able to bulk edit to share with whoever is taking their place.

I know you said the task status is active, but is the project status active as well? We've never had this issue. Here's a screen grab of how we have ours set up. We give them the ability to log hours for future dates, we pre-populate timesheets with work that is within 1 week of the timesheet's work...