Besides getting rid of VB6 because there is no reason at all to be starting new development with it over 20 years after it became obsolete. The VB6 runtime will be no longer supported at the end-of-life of Windows 11, which is currently the end of 2025 last I heard.
Visual Studio community edition is free from
Download Visual Studio Tools - Install Free for Windows, Mac, Linux[
^] and supports VB.NET! Though, VB.NET isn't really long for this world either since it's not getting new features anymore. It would behoove you to move to C#.
The "hold buttons" are easy enough. Create your own Button control that handles the MouseDown, MouseUp, KeyDown, and KeyUp events and exposes its own events, like ButtonDown and ButtonUp. When either the mouse or a key is held down while the button has the focus, raise the ButtonDown event so your application code knows to do something, and a ButtonUp event when it should stop. This makes it far easier to use the buttons without cluttering up your main app code.