are you receiving complete rubbish or just missing some bytes?
I couldn't get a pic to VB thing to work properly some time ago (missing bytes) and it turned out to be the VB software was to blame (to slow?)
opened realterm and all worked well...
Lost trust in VB this way.
Anyhow, if you want a good and free program to monitor the serial port you should get realterm, has 1001 options .
http://realterm.sourceforge.net/
if you're just receiving rubbish then check:
-baudrate , databits, start and stop bits... on both sides
-if you use the hardware usart you need a level shifter that inverts the signal