Although MS Access is a nice db engine it lacks some critical functionality like stored procedures, triggers, etc and it's not free either.
You can create JET based database programmatically but you'll need Access installed when it comes to maintenance or perhaps to print report directly from it.
It might be a headach (to some degree) to migrate your MS Access later on to MS SQL... and so on.
On the other hand if you start with MS SQl 2008 Express you'll find yourself in much better situation.

So, my advise is: VB 2008 Express+MS SQL 2008 Express - both are free btw.