The wrath of FunkyDexter has come
Not wrath so much as frustrated dissapointment. I'm no good at wrath.

Ok, so here is my train of thought. I think im going to wait till vb6 breaks. In the mean time i will continue to see what develops with vbrichclient. I am also learning lazarus which i think is a viable vb6 replacement/ native/ cross platform.

Logically it seems that when vb6 apps break all others like lazarus/qt/etc that compile native will break also
That sounds right on the money to me. I've always maintained that a premature rewrite can lead to disaster. Just make sure you've got a plan in place for when the time comes... and it sounds like you have.

one needs to be a masochist
Well, hey... it takes all sorts. Actually I'd revise my metaphor having seen some of the comments in this thread. I probably should have been talking about flash and ajax which are much more analogous to Silverlight's niche. I just didn't think of them at the time.

But the MS-announcement already broke him (financially), because the potential customer-base
was breaking away along with it...
That's the thing though, I don't think it would have broken him because I don't think potential clients would be walking away... yet. They will eventually as their fears that browsers will stop supporting Silverlight grow but I think that's a very gradual process. It's certainly taken a long time for clients to jump ship on VB6. Knowing an application was developed in Classic certainly can act as a negative factor when a client makes a purchasing decision but I'm not convinced it's an overriding one. They'll buy based on price, functionality and the perceived reliability of ongoing support (which will encompass the fact it was developed in VB6 but will also encompass factors like the longevity of the software vendor). I get the impression from the likes of you and Axisdj that you're concerned about the potential for lost custom (and fully understand that concern) but I don't get the impression you've actually experienced it yet on a significant scale - you'd know though so correct me if I'm wrong on that. So given that MS stopped pushing VB6 well over a decade ago and the world didn't end for you yet, I suspect Silverlight Guy's app has a similar life span ahead of it.

So, what did the guy do wrong exactly?
Was it his fault?
Nothing and no. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sadly that's life.

If that wasn't a "fool me once"-experience, then what is?
That's the thing. I don't think it was a "Fool me once" experience. At worst it was a "Got unlucky once" experience. I've worked in a variety of languages over the years and seen more than a few come and go. I thought Java had had a pretty good continuum since I used it back in the J2 days until I dug out an old project about a year ago and fired it up. The download sites for half the libraries I'd used have magically disapeared so getting that running again would have been a nightmare (though I must admit I gave up with really trying). I can't blame Sun because the libraries were third party... but that's the ecosystem when working in Java. My point is that deciding not to go near MS again for fear of getting burned is the wrong reason to make that choice because you stand a fair chance of getting burned wherever you go.

Switching over to .NET is just *one-of-many* alternatives for VB6-developers
Now there's something we can definitely agree on. I do think it's a fairly natural path to follow due to a reasonably familiar syntax and the existence of the old VB libraries in the .Net framework but I'd no more advocate the automatic selection of .Net any more than I'd advocate the automatic elimination of it. If there's one thing I'm dogmatic about it's that dogma's always a bad thing (there are probably exceptions to that though).

As for the point some others have brought up in the discussion, who are:
"... not selfemployed - and work for a company who dictates which tools they have to use" -
not much to comment about that
Yeah, I've thought a few times when I've seen that argument expressed that, while it may provide a good justification for why they used to .Net it doesn't provide much of an argument as to why you should.