vb express used to be free and may still be available, and being basic is dead easy to learn, but being MS is piss poor to learn. try a google search for it.
the first result from Mr. Google is http://www.microsoft.com/Express/VB/ and looks to be what you could use

and looking a bit further into it, the MS download site doesn't allow firefox to download the latest version, but it does allow you to download the 2005 version, which will still be useful for writing "instant" gui's (read resource hogs)
try
http://www.microsoft.com/express/200...d/default.aspx