in reply to Visual Basic .net and Perl
I had to learn a bit of vb.net for an Object Oriented Programming class and I found it to be quite painful. Basically the teacher was writing a book in vb.net and decided he would make everyone use it for class. I would have much prefered Java or C++ for the course but that's all in the past now thank god. (and I had to scramble to find a windows machine as I was using linux exclusively)
The biggest problem I have with visual basic is that it requires windows. Now if you just want to make some nice looking (but very slow) scripts, vb is the way to go. However, you can't use them on any other operating system. So how important is that to you?
The best reason for using perl is great communities such as this. Because perl has such a wide audience and a great deal of people who really know there stuff, you have a lot of people to help you. However, with visual basic you have a much smaller community willing to help you. I think a large part of this is because perl is open sourced and vb isn't. Therefore, you get a lot of people who have benefited from perl and decide to help others who want to use it.
It certainly won't hurt you to learn visual basic... you just have to decide what you want to do with it. If you are looking to write more powerful programs, I think you took a step in the wrong direction.
If you get bored with vb.net, I'd recommend taking a look at something like Java or possibly even c++. I think those languages will be more useful in the long run.