Many people who haven't used Visual Basic think it sucks because of four things:
1. It's made by Microsoft
2. It has the word "Visual" in its name
3. It's an easy programming language derived from Basic
4. It can only be used to write programs for Windows
In actuality, Visual Basic is a very cool idea. While the runtime files that must be distributed with standalone VB programs are huge and annoying, the VB 6.0 compiler ensures that the programs themselves are plenty fast enough to be usable for anything short of complex 3D modeling or game programming.
But Visual Basic has many more forms than just standalone programs. VB can also be used to create ActiveX objects or DLLs. ActiveX objects can be used in web pages when viewed with Internet Explorer. However, ActiveX is notoriously unsecure, and it's not cross-browser or cross-platform friendly.
So perhaps the most useful aspect of Visual Basic is the VB derivative called VBScript. VBScript can do pretty much everything JavaScript (or ECMAScript) can do, and much more. However, once again, Netscape and other browsers don't support VBScript, even though Microsoft has made the scripting engine freely available. VBScript can also be used server-side in Active Server Pages, and it's an excellent way to provide easy, scriptable customization for any program.
Microsoft Office uses VBScript for macros. Klient, one of the best IRC clients in existence, uses VBScript as its core scripting engine, and is perhaps the most powerful IRC client available because of it.