You're right about not getting any tools, but if you go to microsoft's web site you can download a free (very cool) web based tool. It has it's own very small web server built right in so you can just run it and open the sql server. You can see all of the DBs and you can administer them right form there. You can add, remove and change user rights and you can modify the DBs as well as view/see/query/change the data.
It's very powerful and very small and best of all.... FREE..
Download it here:
To install MSDE you can't just double click the icon. That would be too easy. At the very least you must set a password on the sa user account. For those of you who don't know, the sa account is the built in SQL administrator account. It's not a windows login id though, just a sql login. To do this, open a command prompt and type the following: (at the minimum)
c:\somepath\setup.exe SAPWD="AStrongPassword"
ok, now obviously you will set AStrongPassword to some password of your choice. All version of SQL come with the pubs database installed. You can download the ever popular Northwinds database from Microsoft. It's a SQL script that you can run with the osql executable built in to the MSDE. Very cool what it does. It builds a DB for you as a sample DB.
To connect to it in VB just use the server explorer. You can create your user with the web admin defined above. When you connect to the server it will ask you for your credentials. Simple stuff. If you're programming in VB (or reading this for that matter) you won't have a problem figuring it out. I didn't.
Good luck to all and thanks for all of the great help in all of the threads!!!!!!