Steve,

The problem is that Navigate is an asynchonous call, so it returns inmediately while not ready yet, you need to put a pause there, something like

oIE = createobject('internetexplorer.application')
? oIE.ReadyState
oIE.Navigate('www.tek-tips.com')
lnStart = seconds()
lnTimeOut = 5
do while (oIE.ReadyState # 4) and seconds() - lnStart <= lnTimeOut
enddo
if oIE.ReadyState = 4
  ? oie.document.body.innertext
else
  ? 'timed out'
endif

You must take care of midnight in the seconds() - lnStart expression, and notice also that you'll get an HTML even if the address is wrong, you'll get the 404 HTML. Also you can put a Sleep(lnInteval) in the loop to free up the CPU