Thom, The first issue I see is that you have the port number wrong. The default port number for SSL is
443 and you said you used
683 which is the IIOP[s] port which we used on 4.x for our CORBA portal. The error message indicated this in that it said you couldn't establish an SSL/TLS connection to the specified address:port. The SOAP samples should all be going through port 443.
As for the example on calling the BIG-IP for a single variable, what exactly are you looking for? The LocalLB Pool sample is fairly straight forward in querying either the list of pools, or attributes of a specified pool.
Now, on a side note. If you haven't used VB for a long time, it might be a good time to take a look at C. It's a much more powerful language (IMHO) and much easier to use. Just a thought...
-Joe