Personally, as a fellow geek, I would embrace .NET (not just VB) with open arms.  Having been on a number of courses now for VB and SQL 2005, life has been made somewhat easier in certain respects for the humble developer (although beefier machines are now required to run the development environments ).  And yes, the small team building idea is excellent.

What is stopping the company I work for is "money" - the initial cost of licensing (as per usual) and the cost of the re-write (architecturally, hours to code/test/implement and also the training budget available). 

The philosophy used at the moment is "if it isn't broken, why fix it?"....... to a technology that is now nearly 10 years old.  As well as still supporting SQL 6.5