VB: Need peice of advice

I have couple of questions about VB, so I thought of
the guru's.

I dont think VB should be very hard to learn if someone
already knows C, perl, Java etc pretty well except microsoft
products.
But I dont know where to start from.

Here is my problem.
I am quite busy these days with my other projects
and I have do this project also. so I dont have
time to go through whole VB book. But I am very confident
that I can learn it pretty soon.

I have a project to do here is the outline.

Let me give you a idea of what I am trying to do.
We have a database client which is used to enter
consumer complaints. I have build a tester to test
this client and my mgr has decided to do it in VB 6.0 only
so that this could be tested from diffferent platforms

1) open DB(database) client
2) Login (automatically type in userid and passwd)
choose a local server to connect to.
Passwd,userid and server name are located in a separate file.
3) enter couple of entries and time them from time of submission
to time of response.
4) store the results in a file.

I guess you guys have the idea of what I am talking about.
This has to work on all windows OS(95,98,2000,ME,NT,XP)
Question:
How do I open DB client from a VB application?
I guess I could uses Shell command.
something like
Shell "DBclient c:\DB.exe", vbNormalFocus
But my bigger problem is
1) how do I enter username and passwd
and select which server to connect to (which r DB client options
during signing in)
into DB application from myVB application.
2) How do I use Messaging Queue in windows?
I mean, after VB application automatically loads
DB client and signs in by selecting/using a specific
userid, passwd and server name which are mentioned in
a file on harddrive. I have to enter couple of requests
and the time them. I know one thing DB client writes messages
to windows messaging queue when it starts encrypting to
sending data and getting a confirmation back.
so I am thinking of using them.

I dont want you guys to code it for me, unless you want too :-)
but maybe give me direction which modules of VB I
should concentrate on. Because I dont have alot of time
to read the whole VB book and I already have very good
programming background.