I used VB6 in yr 11, but the school switched over to vb2005 express in the holidays.
The actual coding is not much different, I believe it uses a combination of vb6 and vb.net features. Anyway, it does have a help and also tells you as you're typing code if you've stuffed up some syntax. Also has a lot of really useful features, especially in debugging.
However, therein lies its problem because it seems to need a very fast computer with a fair bit ram. Our school has pretty good computers (as far as schools go) and they ran vb6 fine but with vb2005 there are often major delays. One of the things that really annoys me is that whenever you click the "play" button to test the code, it automatically saves it, compiles it into an exe then runs it. This can often take about 90seconds, so you can't test each line of code as you write it.
So its pros are that its feature packed, cons are that it's heaps slow. I didn't find it too hard to switch over, and MSDN has full support for it.
Just my two cents worth,