Stew Stryker writes us:

So you want your application to pop up a progress form and then start your long processing. Sound simple, right? But if you do this in the form Create event, how do you get the form to display before the processing starts? By the way, I suggest that to pass in the parameters your processing is going to need, you either look at using FDX, or create a static function as part of your form, that your calling program passes with parameters. Sometimes this latter approach works better than FDX, especially if you're trying to get results back.

The answer to my above question on how to get the form to display before the Create event finishes is to simply call the following functions, before you call the function that handles your processing:

this->Visible( true );
this->Update();

This will display your form, and then repaint it, so the users can see it. You wouldn't think the Update call is necessary, but it is.