<p>I am VERY new to ASP.NET.  I come from a VB6 / ASP (classic) / SQL Server 2000 background.  I am reading a lot about Visual Studio 2008 (have installed it and am poking around).  I have read about "reflection" and would like someone to explain, as best as you can to an older developer of the technologies I've written above, what exactly Reflection is and why I would use it...  I am having trouble getting my head around that.  Thanks!</p>

Reflection is how you can explore the internals of different Types, without normally having access (ie. private, protected, etc members).
It's also used to dynamically load DLL's and get access to types and methods defined in them without statically compiling them into your project.
In a nutshell: Reflection is your toolkit for peeking under the hood of a piece of code.
As to why you would use it, it's generally only used in complex situations, or code analysis. The other common use is for loading precompiled plugins into your project.