Well it's amazing what you can find if you search enough! I use Brinkster for my web hosting, but I'm too cheap to pay ~$18/month to add SQL Server to my package. On the other hand, I have Access available. Since .Text is provider-based it made sense I could find a way around this. Sure enough, I located a great MS Access provider. Maybe there are other providers as well, but this was just what I needed. Dimitry Kulakovsky has put together a great implementation that replaces all SQL Server calls. Configuration was fairly straight-forward. Dimitry has some instructions on his blog at http://hatka.net/wlogdev/archive/2004/08/30/179.aspx. If you can't use SQL Server for any reason this is a great replacement.
In other news, I'm well into a bulk image uploader for .Text. More to be posted soon...