That doesn’t quite do what I am looking for though as the load method is called after all of the dll's have been loaded and all of the form layout code has been hashed through.

This is the part that takes the time, not any routine that I have of my own.

That's why I was trying to do it with a separate thread in the startup sub so that the splash screen gets launched before any other code is executed, thus spanning the bridge in time between user double clicking on the program and the application actually loading.

Thanks.