Given your background and what you've said about wanting to move towards development, I'd suggest the following:

You can download the web developer version (with highly limited functionality) of Visual Studio free. You should be able to get that for VB - which in its current version is likely to still be close enough to VB 5 for you to work fairly easily. Microsoft SQL Server Express is another free download.

This pairing will let you get some work towards refreshing your code and SQL skills, as well as the MS unit test framework.

On the strictly QA front, I'd recommend Joe Strazzere's site (http://www.allthingsquality.com) as a starting point. He has a number of book recommendations, too. There's also The Ministry of Testing (http://www.ministryoftesting.com) which has some good free ebooks as well as pointers to good books about testing.

I'd also look at the answers to this question - every book listed is a good one.

With VB skills, you could consider searching for test automation resources. I don't recommend trying QTP for cost reasons, but you could consider Selenium (which is free and has oodles of resources) and can be used with VB.

The last thing I'd suggest is looking to some of the crowd-sourced testing projects, like uTest. These will offer occasional open enrollment where anyone can volunteer to test. This will allow you to build up a portfolio of recent experience - and discover whether the QA field is where you want to be.

Good luck.

Given your background and what you've said about wanting to move towards development, I'd suggest the following:

You can download the web developer version (with highly limited functionality) of Visual Studio free. You should be able to get that for VB - which in its current version is likely to still be close enough to VB 5 for you to work fairly easily. Microsoft SQL Server Express is another free download.

This pairing will let you get some work towards refreshing your code and SQL skills, as well as the MS unit test framework.

On the strictly QA front, I'd recommend Joe Strazzere's site (http://www.allthingsquality.com) as a starting point. He has a number of book recommendations, too. There's also The Ministry of Testing (http://www.ministryoftesting.com) which has some good free ebooks as well as pointers to good books about testing.

I'd also look at the answers to this question - every book listed is a good one.

With VB skills, you could consider searching for test automation resources. I don't recommend trying QTP for cost reasons, but you could consider Selenium (which is free and has oodles of resources) and can be used with VB.

The last thing I'd suggest is looking to some of the crowd-sourced testing projects, like uTest. These will offer occasional open enrollment where anyone can volunteer to test. This will allow you to build up a portfolio of recent experience - and discover whether the QA field is where you want to be.

Good luck.