Terry,

A friend on the Access support forum I subscribe to once described his experience of updating an existing Access application. He had been working almost exclusively with Visual Studio and ASP.NET/ASP/VB/C#, etc., for a couple of years before he was asked to update this Access application (which he had written).

He said that very shortly after he sat down at his workstation he was gaily coding away and typing so fast that people actually came over to him to see if he was faking it!

The point is that Access is a very mature product with lots of high-level developer tools to grease the old application development skids. It certainly isn't for huge, server-draining applications, but in its niche there isn't anything that touches it.