I was informed after my last post that using HTA (HTML Applications) to display a progress bar in VBScript is much more efficient than using InternetExplorer.Application within a VBScript. Having never used HTA before, I immediately set out to learn a bit and see what I could come up with.

My initial thoughts are mixed, as you can not run and interact with an HTA from a VBScript file.  This requires you to wrap your VBScript code in whatever HTML Application you are writing. This greatly limits re-usability, enough so that the increase in performance may not warrant using an HTA for a progress bar in most cases.
» More: HTA Progress Bar using VBScript and JavaScript