Access as a front-end or another query builder

I've tried the many suggestions about making Access as a front-end to
postgreSQL faster, i.e. turned the ODBC trace off, set Declare/Fetch On,
used the commlog, but it still is about 10 times slower than running the
queries in pgadmin.  The Access pass-thru queries kind of defeat the
purpose of having a query builder since there isn't any design view with
them. Is there an FAQ on setting up Access as a front-end or just steps
that are known to provide reasonable performance?

Are there any good free query builders out there?

Ellen