any vb programmers with more than my half hour of experience out there?

Yes, I have many moons of experience with VB.
What is your question/request?

well.. it had me stumped but i just figured it out.

DIM v AS Byte

then i was trying to "v = -v"
when that caused an overflow i was like.. oh, cant do that.
so i "v = v * -1"
and that caused an overflow

then i realized that a byte is 0 - 255
so i defined as integer
prog works fine now. nothing big. not sure how to go about posting source code so i attached the compiled exe. a dumb little program really.