Posted by: Duncan Mackenzie, MSDN
This post applies to Visual Basic .NET 2002/2003/2005

Another answer from Paul Vick, Technical Lead on VB.NET, explaining the changes in array bounds from Visual Basic 6.0:

Why doesn't VB support non-zero lower bounds for arrays?

... We allowed programmers to declare arrays that had bounds from 1 to 20, or from 1001 to 2000 or whatever. Even more puzzling, Eric points out that the CLR does support such arrays. So if there's no historical problem and there's no technical problem, why doesn't VB have non-zero lower bound arrays? ...