Niya, after reading this thread and forcefeeding myself on it, I registered--Just to thank you!
I don't mean to slight any other posters, just that this topic is currently important to me.
I made the decision to finally ween off VB6 after writing an app to read 50,000 INT16 values from an industrial controller.
Using VB6/Winsocks, it is taking about 90 seconds.
With vb.net/multithreading/ (and whatever TCP client methodology I choose) I hope to trim down to less than 30 seconds.