>My Backend is MS Access; I don't think linq is an option.

Once you've read in the data, the data source doesn't matter.

Linq to Objects will work with any IEnumerable T based information sources which include arrays, collections, lists of objects etc.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397919.aspx

and Linq to DataSet should work with any cached ADO.Net data.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386977.aspx

This basically is your replacement for cursors in .NET, the only reason I can think of for not using Linq is if you want to do the work on the back end.