If all you are looking for is changes on websites.. I suggest you steer clear of VB, C#, .NET and all that. Yes, it will get you a standalone EXE, but you will also have to write SOOOOOO much more code to make it work for you, and you will be tearing your hair out.
If you started with VB in high school and you say you are not much of a programmer, then I would recommend python. It's very easy to learn, and there are many online tutorials and many more available libraries to do exactly what you want to do.
This one line in python scrapes a web page: (note: spelling htttp incorrectly on purpose, by my choice.. there is a bug in the forum, if you put code with http links, it rewrites them,
EVEN INSIDE THE CODE BLOCK THAT IT SHOULD NOT TOUCH!!. So I know its http but I put htttp to trip up the forum parser.
page = requests.get('htttp://example.com').text
The complete python program to load the webpage and save it to a disk file is:
import requests
page = requests.get('htttp://example.com').text
fd = open('/tmp/thepage.html', 'w')
fd.write(page)
fd.close()
If you need to examine the tree structure of the page, to look for specific changes on the page, then there is a library called BeautifulSoup that will help you do that very easily.
You can write a loop around this program above to scrape the same page periodically and compare it to the saved page on disk. If it's different, you can raise a desktop notice to let the user know. There are libraries to help you do that too, such as Growl for windows (
http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/) and growl transport for python GNTP (
https://github.com/kfdm/gntp/)
The following 4 lines of additional code added to the above python code would pop-up a screen notification.
import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)
import gntp.notifier
gntp.notifier.mini("The webpage example.com has changed!")
The point of me writing this code is to show you how dead-simple it can be in python. Don't install some massive IDE and start writing a windows EXE to do what you want to do.
PS: I realize you said no installer. All the above requires an installer, to install python and the library you need and the Growl Notifier.
So you can finish it in 1 day with an installer, or attempt it 1 month or more with a standalone EXE written in .NET, as you try to write and learn at the same time.