I have to agree with some of the others who mentioned XOR can often be broken fairly quickly, although I'm not an expert with this. However, there are some other simple ways you may be able to handle encryption, that would work well with the Company X VB coders.

I'm not sure if you're looking to encrypt your data only for the transfer over the wire, or if you're also looking to keep it encrypted while it's being stored.

If you only want encryption over the wire, you may definitely want to consider using SSH in some form. You could either directly call scp from within a Perl script, or you could do something similar with the Net::SSH or Net::SSH::Perl modules.

If you need to encrypt this data while it's sitting in storage somewhere, consider using PGP. There are plenty of Perl libraries for this, including Crypt::OpenPGP, Crypt::PGPSimple, and some others.

Since PGP is fairly widely used, there are language bindings for it in other languages. A ran across SPGP, which claims to be a Simple PGP DLL, which can be used by VB. Thats just one example though, there are bound to be other implementations.

Good luck!
-Eric