Hi all,

I am working on an activeX control in VC++ 6.0. The visual portion of the
control is actually a dialog set to "child" type window, meaning it embeds
within another window instead of popping up like a typical dialog. The
control does some work behind the scenes, and then inserts strings into a
listbox which is a child of the dialog. An OBJECT tag within a web browser
embeds the dialog as a child frame within the Internet Explorer browser.

my problem is, when this is loaded into Internet Explorer, it works fine,
except if someone clicks the window or something, the control seems to
"block" and cause the IE window to resort to that "Not Responding" state --
that is it does not redraw itself, the activeX control does not redraw
itself and display fluently, and it seems to hang. However, even though it
seems to be dead, the activex control is still working and doing its thing
behind the scenes, and at the end of its batch-type process, everything
displays correctly and un-hangs the window, at the end of its thread. So it
actually works fine, and if the user knows enough to not click on it,
everything is displayed correctly and it works well. If someone clicks on
the window or something, it seems to hang even though its still working. the
UI stops processing the visual portion until the entire process is done,
then it frees up again.

is there some setting on the dialog that will "free up" the process to
display fluently within the browser window? If I use the active X control in
VB, I can stop the same problem by calling a "DoEvents" when events are
called from the control, thus freeing up the thread. This works beautifully.
I wish there was some way to do this from IE as well -- for example, get the
browser to respond to custom events from my control, and "do events" in that
time frame. But I don't know if that is the answer. also I'm thinking it
might be one or more of the properties set on the dialog in VC++ -- for
example "no parent notify" or something. I've experimented with this but so
far haven't solved the problem. Does anyone have any ideas about this?

thanks in advance for timely response. Sincerely,

Hugh J. Hitchcock
hjh at webdimensions dot org