Ok,

I have a few actions that take a little while to take place in the gui. When I click a button for the action I would like an animated image to come up to show that it is running, however whenever i set the image to show at the start of the method, the gui gets locked up because of the action that is taking place and the image doesnt show. I can't run it on another thread because i have to return information.

ANy ideas how I can get this picture to show while the thread is busy? Or is there a way to run the action on another thread and return a dataset to the gui thread?

Thanks!

If you are using 2.0, look into the BackGroundWorker class. It is specifically built to handle situations like yours.

It basically takes off and does a long operation in a separate thread so your application can continue on. There are built in methods to "ReportProgress" back to the main application to you can update things like a progress bar.