The complaints about VB aren't new. I don't believe the issue is so much the lack of support, but the problem that the upgrade path that has been presented requires some companies to do a major rewrite of their code, so that they can port it to VB.NET, and gain no net advantage overall.

There were complaints when support ended for Windows 95. It'll happen for any product that ends support, if there is a significant burden on the owners (or renters, depending on your take on software licensing) of the software to move ... especially if it seems that the company is pushing the move to try to force you to buy new software from them, when you already had software that meets your needs. This migration is worse, as it's not just selling new hardware, but your coders need to be retrained, and change significant portions of their existing code. (see VisualBasic.not for a list of incompatabilities between VB6 and VB.NET).

The advantages to VB6/VBA, and the other products in the VB family is that it already comes pre-installed on a large number of desktop systems, so the companies who develop in it don't have to spend extra time supporting their user base in installing new software. (which would be required from just about anything these days that doesn't run exclusively in a web browser, like the JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript family, or older versions of Java (if you standardize on too recent of a version, you can shoot yourself in the foot). I'm not going to pretend that VB runs everywhere, but for some companies, it fits their needs, and they have no good migration paths.

How big of a deal is this overall? I'm going to guess it's on the order of magnitude of y2k -- it has the potential to screw up a whole lot of things, but odds are, it's not, if companies do their due diligance, and the media is overhyping this to attract readers so they justify the price at which they sell advertising.