>I am a newbie with visual basic. I am try to create a frame similar to those in many of the internet mail programs. One that can display a folder in one panel, the message headers in another and a preview of the message in another panel below the other two.

So, you basically want to do a Visual Basic interface like we have here in the Universal Thread. I'm not familiar with Visual Basic but I would say that you have to create a form for every frames and using the object name to refresh the form you want like oForm1.Refresh(), oFrom2.Refresh(), etc.