>I am pulling down several large tables from an Oracle database and was wondering if anyone has come up with a means of showing the progress for this sort of operation. I have tried the "timer" route but it looks as if the timer events get put into the queue as the "SELECT" query eats up the cpu time. Any ideas?

You might set the max for your progress bar to the number of passthrough cursors you are generating, bumping it ONE after each cursor is completed.