In most of these types of conversions, you wind up leaving the front and as
an mdb. in this type of scenario, there's no advantage to move into 2003 or
later.

it for some reason you choose the route of making an access project (adp),
that in fact there are some advantages as the later versions (2007) will
work correctly with sql server 2005. another words, if you use an access
data project, then you can use the built in query design tools inside of MS
access to design and develop your tables. however, I've always recommended
this approach if you're starting from scratch, or you don't have an existing
application with very much code (sense, if you go to access data project,
you'll have to rewrite all of your dao code).

If you're just going the ODBC link table way, then you can stick with what
you've have since you'll be using the SQL server management tools to build
and set up your tables on the server side.