well, the white paper you responded to contains VB .NET code for reading the dashboard port. Actually, it was a lot harder to make this for VB .NET than for VB 6.0 because of the removal of the mscomm control. Nate Smith posted a dashboard custom control that works for VB 6.0--you can use that to write your dashboard program if you don't want to make the switch. Go to
this thread to find it.