Deleo:Ajax has their own controls for just that feature.
If you dont want to use Ajax, then you should look into asynchronous calls. In the page_load, fire a async that does all the loading. While that thread is crunching numbers, just display an animated gif or something...but you would have to make a postback or rerender after the loading is done to remove the animated gif again...i think....I would go for the ajax or javascript :)
Well if its an asynchronous postback then the ajax will work, however from what I understood from his post , this is not the case and the intent is to display a loading image on the initial load
Jeev
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