Hi,
Yes, it look OK to me, the quadrature decoding seems to be correct but I'm sure someone around here knows of a faster/slicker way of doing it. (I'm not saying your way is slow).

Are you sending directly to a VB program for testing or are you sending to a terminal program or something like that? If a terminal program I'd put Pause 100 or whatever in the mainloop and add a CR to the end of the "message". If you're sending to a VB program, you could send the high and low byte of the counter and put them together in the PC.

If the encoders have Index-channel you could use that to zero the counter, at startup you move each joint of the arm thru "center" and it automatically zeros.

/Henrik.