Q: What version of VB should I use?

This really depends on what you want to do. The Visual Basic Control Creation Edition available from MSDN in the Member Downloads section is free and is probably a good first choice if you don't have the money for other versions or just want to check out VB before buying. Some controls and features are not available but the product is still substantially intact and a great way to get started.

There is also a Learning Edition that has a few limitations but it does include additional tutorial material and is the least expensive of the payed editions. Upgrading to a better edition is available so this may be an option if money is tight.

The Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition are the 'real' thing with all the features of this very potent language. The main difference between the two is that the Enterprise Edition has additional features that make it a better choice for the team development and deployment typical of an enterprise environment -that and the price ;-)

You can find additional information in the Product Information section of Microsoft's Visual Basic Home Page.

Two other choices bear mention;

Many developers opt for Visual Studio which is a substantial development tool suite that includes Visual Basic, Visual J++, Visual C++, Visual InterDev and other tools.

There is also a version of VB originally built into MS Office known as VBA or Visual Basic for Applications which allows the programmer to access the inner workings of programs that support it. With the rapid increase of applications licensing VBA this is definetly something worth learning.