@Silverlight: 64bit? No Dice. Really??

I hear you, yeas there has to be a side-by-side offering of x32 stuff for that kind of thing.
I am not saying that all x32 stuff has to stop next week etc....

I recall the move from DOS to Win95
I recall the WIn16 to WIn32 issues...
Heck way back I even had a DOS TSR I coded to handle some task I had...

There is room for each.... just that one of the ways to get more / better use of the new hardware is to have more stuff that uses it.
surfing is not a big number-crunching thing ... but it's visible.

as for Access it's a whole can of worms....
I did a number of things for some folks in Access bucause that's what they wanted it in and they paid for it.
it was departmental apps inside a larger corp.  they had access on the desktops and anything in Access that was inside the dept. buget could fly under the radar ... and avoid having centeral IT get into it.
internal politics and all that.... it was good money and good folks but I had to make sure key folks knew that access had issues we had to work around.
I did get them to finaly let me replace a 20-30 step process in access and opening web browsers to download data with a .Net client app
that automated the process and only had the user do like 5 steps most of which was to enter a login for the web site.
I did http web requests and file gets and opened the access db to import the data.
took out a bunch of places where the human might make a mistake.
made the morning job of the team much simpler and faster.