Hi olhexy,
You really should give Visual Basic Express a try. I will give Microsoft due credit, they make an excellent IDE. It can seem very busy to start with but if you go through some step by step tutorials you will get used to it very quickly. Most of the stuff inside the VB IDE you will never use. You wont need to go through much documentation, just a few tutorials to get you from creating a project to building it. I have been using the Visual Studio package since version 6 and now actively use Visual Studio 2010 (VB and C#).
Inside Visual Studio 2010 you can choose which framework you would like to work with ie. DotNet 1.1, 2, 3, 3.5 etc. I like this feature for making GUI's of different styles and its always nice when you can make an application that matches the graphical style of certain OS's. There is another use to being able to choose your framework concerning serial communications. Microsoft did manage to break the serial comms in one of the DotNet versions, if my memory serves me correctly it was broken in DotNet 3.0 but was fixed in 3.5. I could be a bit off with that but I know it didnt work correctly in one of the versions.
Overall I would recommend the MS Visual Express packages. Take a day to mess around with it, I dont think you'll be disappointed. :)
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