The speed is different, but only slightly - I have a .Net program which does some quite complex work once per second on my computer, and in an entire day it takes about 10 minutes of CPU time, whereas the VB6 equivalent takes about 20 seconds less.

.Net is not more complicated, it is just different (and in various ways much easier, such as no code required for "on top" or "notification icon"). As chris128 implied, the problem is you want to keep using your existing skills and not learn new ones. There are some reasons that .Net is not right for everyone (such as esposito's almost unique situation, and a few others), but not wanting to learn is not one of them.

As for VB6 support on Windows, it has nothing to do with Windows being 32 bit (it works fine on 64 bit for me and others above). What it is about is being able to run 32 bit programs (which is likely for all 64 bit versions), and support of the VB6 runtimes (msvbvm60.dll and many other files), which is by no means guaranteed after Windows 7. If the runtimes are unsupported, it would arguably be foolish to include them (or allow them to be installed without warnings), as total failure of programs is likely to be better than them having a large amount of unknown bugs.


Whether you like it or not, the era of VB6 being a viable option is coming to an end - and as such it isn't nice to recommend that somebody should start learning it now.