>Actually, I have _screen.visible=.f., the form i'm referring to is a top level form - kind of an app launcher (there are several seperate sections of my application) The taskbar button doesn't even have the fox icon in it - its completely blank...have you heard of any win32 API calls I could make with the hwnd to suppress this? or anything?

I've heard about that at DevCon. I don't think there is anything to do to avoid this empty task bar while the top level is loading.