My opinion is if you have no experience with Visual Studio of any version, start with the latest 2010.

There is a free download link from Microsoft for the Express version.

If you do have VB5 or 6 experience it may seem a different environment at the beggining.

But we live in 2010 so going back is not very wise... After all most of the PCs are running Vista or 7 and VB6 can only be installed on XP machines. I did on a Vista but has a lot of problems.

Another idea is the Profilab by Abacom. It does not require any lanquage knowledge. It's like the Labview in a more simple and cheaper version.

http://www.abacom-online.de/uk/html/profilab.html

Also last but not least, we are all waiting for Darrel's IDE that will have bells and whistle's to do the job.

Hope it will not be long...

Ioannis