Urgent Help

Hi, At the moment i am having a very hard time trying to figure out how i should; Make an app. where users from my site are allowed to sign up with a password and username and then the next visit, if they wish they can login from their username and password. The biggest prob. actually is all the 'crap' i found on the net; (asp, jsp, sql, oracle,xssi,mysql) and so on, but the php technology and your site was reccomended to me from one of my frineds who is a proffesional c/c++ programmer. With a wonderful prizetag i knew that php was the way to go. Ok now; I have MS Access. For achieving my element above, what do u most reccomend, and if possible can u pls. tell me whereabout it'll be in the manual. I did see the dbase_add; and functions similiar, but does that allow for the login and me to view the file. I really do appreciate php, and i'm learning it quite quickly, so if you can reccomend on how to read/write to an access dbase from php, pls. help me. Or any other way which is applicable. Also can u pls. mention if i'll need the binary files (the sdk kind of thing) i downloaded. And if possible pls. reply with free or very cost-efficent ways. Thanx