Jess,

>Well, educate me for this. Do you mean that my current VB app will be mandatorily .NET enabled if I want to use VB7? That I could no longer build a traditional WinApp w/o that .NET thing? No more backward compatibility?

That's the way I read it.

Hop over to www.devx.com to the Visual Basic newsgroups, to the vb7 group, and read up on it there. Look at all the moaning and groaning about the changes to VB. Also look for a link on devx to their page with 100's of resources for .NET. One of THOSE links is to the DevelopMentor discussion list, which has a web archive of VERY in-depth discussions about .NET. (Many of the Microsoft development team are posting there every day).