Massive overkill: VB Express

I have just spent a week learning enough about VB Express to do a simple excercise - watched a introductory video tutorials and vistited a few web sites. Today I managed to publish it to a CD and try it out on my laptop. I was astonished to see that it had to download and install Microsoft .net framework before my tiny application could run.
All I want to do is create a user interface window (labels, data entry fields and maybe some illustrative graphics) that builds an ascii text file for use as input for another application. The other application is an FEA package that requires an ascii script file to define the problem parameters. I don't need all the network functionality. But, it seems there is no way to avoid it.
I've done a lot of programming in the past - Basic, Fortran, Assembler. But, it was all pre-Internet (1980s).
Is there any way to get my application done without having to deal with the network environment?