Right, this is something I have been trying recently. You need something available to read it, be that the Office suite, ACE ODBC driver, PCFiles Server etc. If the file is old, MDB then its even more of a pain, bit incompatabilities etc. We had to get an old version of Access and upgrade the version of those files. Simply put, if you use M$ products you are tied into their software. A final option, you could look at OpenOffice, LibreOffice, they tend to have parsers that can read files from Office. Don't know how good they are for Access.
There is however one other option that I found, its called youaccess, a command line tool which can dump the data out from MDB files to CSV:
http://youaccess.sourceforge.net/
It doesn't get the metadata (i.e. the structure of the data) as that is held very awkwardly in MDB, however you can get the data out.
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