Ok... I'm trying to decide which programming language to learn and... well I can't decide!

From the look of C# it appears to be just a VB with a syntax change, and, although I've programmed in VB before I find it a little "not as powerful" as VC++

So my question is: Does C# offer the same performance as VC++?

I tried to figure this one out and created a blank form (in C# or VB, it doesn't matter, they make it the same), classic windows app and when ran, the task manager showed me it used about 6 megs of memory. In VC++ a MFC app uses a little over 3 megs and a classic generated "Hello world" app 2.8 megs... so I'm talking about optimization and making your app use as little memory as possible.

P.S. do you know why the win processes use so little mem? 'cos I don't! (a very small console C++ app uses like 800Kb)
Are they written in Asm or something like that?