Ken,

Those single monolithic execution statements are always going to be bad news. You can add a further slowing down udf call in there that would allow for a feedback mechanism. If your PRG understands it's running inside this COM environment it could always do somthing like set a % complete property of the COM object itself that you can periodically query from the client making the call to see how far along it is and let the user know.

>oh, right, in that case it will be an issue, that would in effect freeze the system during some prg's which is exactly the effect I was hoping this would cure. I'll give it a test, and if that is the case I guess I'll have to switch to using data in a shared table or somthing as a way of messaging rather than calls to functions.
>
>will test now and get back on how it goes.