I said I wouldn't use it for a game or encoder "I wouldn't use it for a game or an encoder" not that I would.
Try .NET. It's incredibly fast running code compared to VB6 and it doesn't overflow just because of a lot of instructions occuring at once. I can't stress how much faster VB.NET runs than its older brother VB5/6.
I use it for control apps, email clients, IRC clients, text games, file processors, etc. It's just so versitile.