There are many rules to be followed while programming, VB.NET being a language of .NET framework, I would suggest the common tips that I regularly do suggest to others. Your executable, being 60MB is the first problem, why are you so eager at pushing 60MB of data when a simple executable of 1-5MB can load a basic application! Why don't you use modularization and create multiple DLL files to be used as libraries. This would literally decrease the size of your executable because most of the code would go in the libraries and won't be a hurdle while loading the application; linked libraries are linked later as needed.
This is the first step that you need to take, read this,
How to create DLL in VB.NET - Stack Overflow[
^]. Always create objects, libraries, files that are needed later. In the executable, just write the code that makes the application running. Later, start loading things one by one. Do not push everything in the starter loop.
That is not it. You also mentioned that your application "freezes", that is when you try to write everything and perform every action on the UI thread itself. .NET framework supports threading which can highly increase the performance of your application.
Using Threads and Threading[
^]. But that is not it, sometimes you have to literally push the code to background. In .NET framework, C# and VB.NET share this feature, this MSDN document would be helpful in guiding you with that,
Asynchronous Programming with Async and Await (C# and Visual Basic)[
^], asynchronous approach will solve maximum of your freezing problems; but doesn't guarantee 100% freezing free performance.
Finally, keep everything on a background thread. The UI thread must be left free for generating the graphics, for handling the user interaction, such as button clicks, input of keyboard etc. If UI thread is frozen, it doesn't mean application is stuck, most of the times it means that the application is processing a time-consuming task.
There are many ways to optimize the code, and there are many ways to make it bad. Just make sure, you're following the best practices provided by developers themselves. MSDN is famous for providing such guides and resources to developers. How about this?
Coding Techniques and Programming Practices[
^].