Mih_Flyer - jazzy_josh is pretty well right, you don't need to worry about response times too much when the db is sat on your local hard drive. Performance becomes as major issues when networks are involved and/or distributed applications are used. Adding the right indexes will still make a difference, after all there's no point waiting when you don't have to. As far as technology goes, Access 2000 should do the trick quite happily. If you're using VB 6 you will need SP4 to make the two talk properly.

As for code ? Well, you will need to create a recordset which contains the results of an SQL query. The query itself is just 'SELECT * FROM Table1 WHERE x=1 AND y=2' and the recordset contains a list of those records which match the criteria. In ADO you can create a recordset directly, without the need for a separate ADOconnection object. In DAO ( VB 5 & VB 6 ) you'll need to open a database and then create the recordset. The two technologies are pretty similar in this area and moving between the two shouldn't be too difficult. I could go on for ages giving you a full tutorial but unfortunately I don't have the time. There's plenty of info. out there and on the MSDN CD so have a read and then have a play. All these acronyms ( ADO, DAO, RDO, ODBC, etc ) might seem confusing at the start but once you grasp one then the others are just variations on the same theme.

Stick with it and put posts here if you get stuck.