Upgrade to MSDE

Unless you are going to import the data into MSDE and make use of it's much better performanec and functionality, now or in the near future there seems little point. ADO.NET will work with access as well as it does with anything else.

As with all situations, the answer is it depends.

If, for instance, the application runs on a single computer with only one user at a time, Jet will work better and faster.

If the application runs on multiple computers with the backend database on a server and has more than one user at a time, then MSDE can offer significant improvements. Greater improvements are obtained if you use stored procedures or pass-through procedures, because then the work is done at the server, not at each workstation. I have seen a number of applications that were migrated to MSDE but never saw any significant benefit because Jet (which underlies Access) still did all the work locally.

The greatest benefits of MSDE come by modifying the code to take advantage of how MSDE works versus Jet.

Microsoft is releasing SQL Server 2005 Express Edition in November 2005. I suggest you prepare and migrate to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition when it is released. Make sure you modify your code to run stored procedures, that way you will get considerable improvement in performance.