VB6 (aka VB 1998) is used less and less over time, and we don't know yet if VB6 programs will work at all on the next version of Windows. It is unsupported, so will not be upgraded etc.

The recent versions of VB are supported, and they also have lots of extra features built in (such as minimising to the area next to the clock, and many more) that take quite a bit of effort in VB6.

It can be hard to switch from one to the other, but as a beginner I don't think either is harder than the other - as such I recommend to go straight to the latest version, which you can get for free from www.microsoft.com/Express