In creating a program recently, I wanted my VB5 progress bar to show action, rather than percent complete. So I came up with a technique where I initialize: ProgressBar1.Max=1000 Then in a later loop where I am displaying progress as I move through a file, my code says: ProgressBar1.Value=X mod 1000 X is a count of records read from a file, which I have no way of knowing the number of records beforehand. This way, using MOD,  I never have an out of range error in setting the progress bar value.  Once the number of records is over 1000, then using MOD, the progressbar is reset to 0.