ASP forum question

I built my forum years ago using ASP and an access database. All the posts - topics and replies are added to the same table and I tag the topics. I then show records where topics = Y, count the replies for each topic and order by descending date etc. Everything has been working fine for years but the trouble is, there no relation between the topics and the replies so it's not easy to rename a topic.

So I'm starting again from scratch and I have two tables in Access - Topics and Replies, with a relation, one to many, on the topic title. I'm struggling a bit now as to how I should proceed. Should I use SQL to display all the information by doing a join on the two tables, or should I write, or more like copy and adapt, a script to post to the two tables and update them that way?

One problem that I have is when someone posts a topic there will be no replies. Yet I want to show all the posted items in Descending order - topics and replies, based on date. I've had some sucess with using left join to display all the topics with a count of the threads, but I'm now struggling with joining the dates (of the topics and replies) and getting them to order. I'm happy to contine experimenting as it's all part of the learning curve, I just want to know if I'm doing the right thing or whether there's an easier way.

My tables are:

Topics: tdate | tname | ttitle | tcomment

Replies: rdate | rname | rtitle | rcomment

I guess an easy way would be to make posting a topic a two stage process so a user would first create a new topic - which would be inserted into the topics table, and then they would post their comment to the replies table. Thanks!