Aha! I just went back to the page again ... I was tricked yesterday when I quickly read the ManagedEsent <http://managedesent.codeplex.com/> page. I downloaded the DLL of interop and I see it has a sample console app which seems to perform some quite complex work.
It looks like they've implemented a fair bit of the C API, and I can see some samples and documentation. I hope it's easy to use, as I regularly have a need for this sort of really lightweight database with little to no footprint. I'm going to send these guys an email of congratulations. Greg