Thanks Bill, Bob and Erik for all your help. I finally got this thing to behave itself.

Bill, as far as I can tell you can't rely on the events to fire unless you're running the latest version of IE. Seems IE 4.0 is quite buggy. I elected to go with polling the ReadyState per Erik's suggestion. I really didn't want to go that route but it seems the most stable. To verify the document load I just added a unique ID tag at the end of the document. Wrapped all the routines to handle the navigation and doc load verification into a class and I'm good to go.

Bob, Rick's book has a pretty good write up on the control - thanks again

>It seems that Erik and Bob have given you the info you need. I'm surprised that NavigateComplete2 is not working for you. It seems to work fine in my app, even when the web browser control is not visible.

Under IE 4.0/NT it didn't want to fire when the control was on a container. It fired fine when I moved it to the form level. With IE 5.0 it always fired as well as "some" of the other events. IE 4.0/98 NavigateComplete2 fired ok when on a container but other events did not - progresschange, downloadcomplete: Arrgh!