VB6 strings are Unicode as they are. There are several problems though:

1) native VB6 controls do not support Unicode. They convert to ANSI.

2) file manipulation is not Unicode aware: converts from/to ANSI

3) regular API calls do ANSI conversion as well

4) VB6 IDE is ANSI only (when you write "ABC" it is converted from ANSI to Unicode and is Unicode in final executable)

VB6 does have a few Unicode functions, ie. AscW() and ChrW$() let you use Unicode characters in strings.