DX8 Assy/C++ COM Wrapper for VB6

WHY?
This is somewhat for charity since it is for my learning disabled friend who has been working on his project for 30 years.
I work for the estate that manages his care (I am the caregiver, only a fair VB6 programmer- it rubs off).

Payment
We can only afford $300 per moth for brief periods of your effort ---
You needn't write this all at once.

Why again??
This is for his mental health's sake - an effort to get the frame rate up on his 3d self-entertainment engine
that now is trying to render a 200K (max size) polygon scene on a Pentium4 3.8Ghz Nvidia FX5500 computer.
Currently it gets 7fps in Visual Basic 6-- He needs to edit the program, so it must be in VB6...
We know it's capable of probably a much higher frame rate, but the Dx8VB.dll file slows us down.

I have seen other topics on this board that talk of cross-thread communication and have downloaded a few
samples that have some potential by the geniuses here.

Open Source
This isn't just for him, since the engine when updated (it is finished already) will be posted for everyone's benefit.
He doesn't want to post it until it looks good though.
It would help if you understood VB6 a bit- at least enough to interface with it for the function calls to the type-library,
COM, Wrapper, or DLL, whatever will run fastest, I guess.

What we've tried
TrueVision3D and BlitzBasic3D - TV was close, but didn't do quite what he needed.
BlitzBasic I thought was cool, but he can't grasp the new language, so...
I realize this sounds like a tall order and the software required is antique, but we can help
provide any tools you might need to develop in like VB6 itself and a version of MASM32
that will run in Windows 98SE. Yeah, I know... VB6 runs in XP, so, please help me help him.
He can't learn this new stuff, it's so sad to watch him.

Thank you for reading this,
Joe