>Thanks for this. Would a solution be (rather than SQL Server) using Windows Terminal Services where the user's PC becomes a dumb terminal and all processing is done on the server. Have you any experience of this? If so, is it better/worse than SQL Server in terms of getting up to speed on it?

I have no experience with deployng an app, that will be accessed via WTS, but AFAIK it should be possible. Cannot tell you whether it is better/worse than SQL Server. Maybe it will be faster for you as a developer to switch to this, but I do not know whether (or not) you may experience scalability issues.