I just have experience with Visual Basic.NET 2003, 2005 and 2008. I don't have any experience with Visual Basic 6 and before. I've experienced a lot of slowness in running a lot of the graphics screens in an application I've been working on for more than 2 years now. I moved to a new computer and it runs some screens quite a bit faster but I could swear that my old AMD processor computer from 2005 was running some of the screens faster than my new computer which is an Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB on Vista and XP(dual boot set up).

I remember hearing that Visual Basic 6 runs fast. Can you create a Visual Basic 6 application that can be released for Vista or XP? I thought that the answer to this is no but I see there are a lot of people still working with Visual Basic 6. I plan on finishing the Visual Basic 2008 project I'm working on which is a personal project of my own and releasing it to run on the currently used operating systems but I've been considering moving to another language that is perhaps more cpu efficient.

There are problems I know in the GDI of Visual Studio. I discovered one that I reported to Microsoft Connect last summer. They acknowledged the problem and said they would do something about it. They haven't yet and in fact were very slow to finally tell me that they were handing the problem off to some other team but they didn't tell me exactly which one.

Anyway I was wondering if you're doing graphics programming and you want speed and efficiency are there some promising alternatives to Visual Basic 2008 that will work with todays operating systems? I've seen some screen saver programs that were written back in the 90s that work so smoothly and I'm thinking here we are in 2009 with all this extra processing power and yet a lot of the programs seem to run slower than some of the stuff that was written in the 90s.