Gerald Johnson wrote:
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I'm not a bad VB programmer

...but apparently you know very little about serial communications ;o)

Like Erik said, the startbit is generated by the hardware and no, there is no way around it!

Have you got anything in your VB code that looks like this:
frmMain.MSComm1.Settings = "115200,N,8,1"

If not, the serial port of your PC will not be initialised properly and you will not be able to send anything. The value '115200' is the baudrate, which you should set to the appropriate value. 'N,8,1' means there's no Parity bit, 8 databits and 1 Stop bit.

Good luck,
Rob Klein.