I don't think it necessary to check if the path exists before create it. Instead, you'd better do some error handling by using On Local Error in VB6 or Try...Catch in VB.net. The reason for doing so is that we can treat the "Path already exists" as a sort of error as well as "Failed to create a new directory". So you needn't perform the check - just let the error handler code do it. It may speed up your code in some cases.