Thanks PaulS for the hint I'll give it a go....
For those wanting a good I/O GUI from Visual Basic to Arduino the following link I've discovered looks promising:
http://mathias-wilhelm.de/arduino/projects/arduino-dashboard/
I've had a bit of a play with it late last night but there may be a bit of trap with the original and later version of MsTimer2.h as downloadable from this link Arduino Playground - MsTimer2 I've still to spend more time on it but the original version of MsTimer2 seems to be compatible with the published application code.
Regards all