Visual Basic mode doesn't work after update

Question

I'm on Windows. I updated my emacs to 24.4. Now, when trying to open a file that has its extension mapped to the Visual Basic mode at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/visual-basic-mode.el, I get these errors:

file mode specification error (void-variable \\)

Debug stack trace:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable \\)
  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*> nil "d:/Program Files/emacs/share/emacs/site-lisp/visual-basic-mode.el" nil t)  ; Reading at buffer position 69251
  load-with-code-conversion("d:/Program Files/emacs/share/emacs/site-lisp/visual-basic-mode.el" "d:/Program Files/emacs/share/emacs/site-lisp/visual-basic-mode.el" nil t)
  visual-basic-mode()
  set-auto-mode-0(visual-basic-mode nil)
  set-auto-mode()
  normal-mode(t)
  after-find-file(t t)
  find-file-noselect-1(#<buffer file.vbs> "d:/file.vbs" nil nil "d:/file.vbs" nil)
  find-file-noselect("d:/file.vbs" nil nil t)
  find-file("d:/file.vbs" t)
  call-interactively(find-file nil nil)
  command-execute(find-file)

Answer 1

The debug message says that there's a problem at position 69251, so you can visit visual-basic-mode.el and (goto-char 69251) to inspect the text and see what the problem is.

It turns out that, if you're using the file from the EmacsWiki, position 69251 corresponds to the first non-comment line after (provide 'visual-basic-mode). There's a lot of junk from here to the bottom of the file, so it looks like someone accidentally pasted some scratch work here and forgot to remove it. Either comment it out or delete it, and you should be fine.