I use VB5 at work and VB6 at home for consultant gigs. There really isn't enough in way of benefits in VB6 to invest the extra money. The differences are fairly minor, although the ability to look into databases while debugging is a big advantage. Other differences are minor, such as the ability to use the SPLIT function to parse strings.
VB.Net, in my opinion is worth the wait, and I highly reccomend getting the BETA version (for free from Microsoft) to get familiar with it. With your background it would probably be easier for you to learn VB.net than VB5/6 being that it is highly object oriented.
Good luck Joseph Logan
jlogan@softsource.net