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>Without using either of them, I'm gonna learn C# before I get up to speed with VB. The reason? C# is probably closer to Java and VC++ than VB, so learning one will get me that much closer to finding an excuse to do some Java, VC++ work.

I've tackled Java some and VC++ very little, and I think you're right about C# and Java. I picked up Laura Lemay's 21 Days book back when Java was at 1.2, and I didn't find it too bad at all. Strong OO concepts, which made it alot of fun, and a lot of the rest of it looked like C. The biggest learning concept for me was that everything is threaded and runs inside of Try/Catch/Exception blocks, but even that doesn't seem to be such a big deal. As I was going through it, though, the JDK bumped up to 1.7, and they kept talking about how Java2 was going to have some major changes, especially with the UI packages, so I put it aside with the intention of picking up again when Java2 rolled out (haven't done that yet). I don't know how Java2 is, but one thing that really stood out in the 1.x versions was how really, really primitive the UI packages were.