Distribution of MSDE to 5,000 end users - good idea or bad?

Our company has an application that we distribute to our agents for generating sales quotes and it currently runs against an Access database. There is some interest in changing to MSDE and we're just trying to solicit some feedback from people that either investigated this or have tried it.

Here is our application and end user profile:

The application is a relatively small VB application that is distributed to about 5,000 agents. The data is stored in two separate physical database files (with many tables in each). One database stores the user-created data like prospects and configured options, and the other database stores the configuration options and rating data. The configuration option and rating data changes quarterly which is handled today through a new download of the software which overwrites the Access database that contains just that data. The agents are independent and sell for many companies, not just ours, and they own and use their own computer equipment. I would say they are probably at or below average for technical experience for end users. The proposal is to convert the application to run against an MSDE database and to include and install a copy of MSDE as part of the application installation. We would probably distribute service packs along with the quarterly updates, but agents do not always install the updates or could stop selling for us at any time, so there is no guarantee that the updates will ever be applied.

Dramatic overhauls of the application are not being considered at this time, and the users frequently do quotes while on-site with clients and they do not always have access to the Internet. In effect, while a web-based model may seem ideal, we would definitely lose sales if the agents are not able to quote with an off-line source of data and application, and the project is only evaluating whether or not it is a good idea to convert the database from Access to MSDE.

Thanks in advance for your comments!
ChrisYou've already pointed out the biggest issues. Service pack updates are a must. Beyond that, I would think this kind of situation lends itself to Access. I would think unless you plan on upgrading all of these machines to .NET, that it would be best to stick with the most distributable option of Access and the VB App.|||Should you decide to move this to .NET then an option might also be to just use XML for your data storage. If the amount of data is not very large, then Access or MSDE might actually be overkill. Deployment of XML based data is pretty straightforward too.