skiflyer I agree with you that for anything serious if you ask me JET or MySQL and I can impliment either I would go for MYSQL just for the transaction support. If it was multi user I'd have to throw out JET right away too.
But seeing JET is old and Microsoft is replacing it with MSDE I would, at this time, impliment MSDE over MySQL probably.
Access (as a front end tool) , as foolio12 points out, is good in a few situations. It gives the end user easy ADHOC reporting functionality. Instead of having to have a few programmer waste resources generating ADHOC reports just have the users goto a coarse and provide them read only views to simplify the database schema so they can get what they want. The next step, and it is a big powerful step, is providing OLAP tools for them to use. Often power ACCESS users have no problems picking up concepts of pivot tables and what kind of information they can provide. We've had some great success setting up Data cubes and going straight to executives and sitting with them for 2 hours showing them how to use some of the OLAP tools that are available cheeply from Microsoft. The end result is pretty amazing. They've gone from requesting a report and getting it in about a week to the executive sitting at their laptop looking at the data faster then it used to take them to dictate what they wanted to their PA. To add to this many times they would look at the data and go "That isn't what I want, I want ...." we then woud show them a few thing and before you know it they have data that they can manipulate to make effective decisions in a matter of minutes rather than weeks."
Problems I have seen in ACCESS is when defining linked tables and queries that are supposed to be passthough I have seen ACCESS, for some reason, pull the entire tables down locally and execute the query locally. Needless to say this is slower and down right stupid when you concider the person may be off site dialing in. I've seen corruption in access a few times. Usually it comes from 2 users trying to add data and something happening while the OS was actually allocating more disk space to the database at the time.
So I've basically hijacked the thread and want to change it to a comparison of MSDE and MySQL