If your going the extra mile to write a custom VB application for this, might I suggest you "map" the NetUserChangePassword API within your VB program and simply call it from there ... that way you can check PWAGE from within your script ... then call your VB app to change the password and be done with it. Then there will be no need to pass info through the registry back to your script - then to a command-line util ...

See the changepass.zip sourcecode for API specifics ...

-Shawn