OMG! What a mistake! VB.NET does not support UTF8 encoding - BUT - that is because I was removing the - from UTF-8!
Haha. What a silly mistake on my part! When I fixed it - UTF-8 works just fine in Visual Basic .Net! My code was at fault. But, the rest still stands - you have to remove the white space from the beginning of the document AND Remove the - from the rest of the document apart from UTF-8! Haha. Sorted it now.
