Hi Chris,
You'll probably get a varitey of opinions on this one so I suggest you listen to a few before spending time and money on this... here's mine:
Visual Studio is the proverbial sledge hammer to crack a nut in your situation. To be honest, so is VB.NET if you're certain you won't want to do any more than this kind of thing. The bottom line is, Mr Gates has decided to take his software development packages in one particular direction and most people feel obliged to follow (with good reason in the commercial world). He's assumming at some stage you'll want the whole world to use your software and access your data from the net, hence all the bells and whistles (and insanely complcated prcedures). If your simply doing your own thing and want the best tool for the job, I suggest two options:

VB6 (now also known as VB Classic)
This will be the "visual" or windows form-based equivalent to your existing product. Programming in VB6 is very easy to pick up and has a huge online community available for support/code sharing. The only problem may be getting hold of a new copy since MS have moved on to the whole .NET thing. You may also want to consider similar environments like Delphi (tho' I'm not sure why ;-) )

VBA
From what you've said, I don't see any reason why you couldn't use VBA to achieve all this. Same ease of use (since it's Visual Basic) and very easy to construct a maintainable, modular system since it's based in the apps your using. Your already using an Access db - It's the next logical step (from the info you've given).

Well that might be the answer you'd expect on a VBA forum