Wes,

My 0.02. Consider most strongly:
- database size (number of records, size in megabytes)
- the ways in which you want to interrelate data
- the ways in which you want to traverse and/or manipulate interrelated data

The VFP database engine absolutely smokes Access. Not just in speed, but in dexterity as well. But that really doesn't matter if you're only going to have a few thousand records in your tables. However, if plan to have several hundred thousand records or more, you will regret that you used Access.

If you know Access well and you just need upsize-ability, you might be able to move faster by using VB/Jet or VB/MSDE with an overall architecture that will support eventual migration to SQL server.

If you want top-speed performance with relatively large datasets/subsets (i.e., with large local cursors), or top speed with a file-server architecture rather than client-server, VFP will treat you very well.