Has anyone succeeded in being able to display a progress indicator in a "floating" div on IE?

The problem is when you run a script from an onclick event (a form button) and the script is creating other records so can take several seconds, the page simply looks frozen so I want to display a progress indicator and update the message.

I have been able to do this easily in FireFox. A semi-transparent background, an animated progress indicator and updating the progress message as the script code processes.

In IE however, I can not get the DIV to display from a button click. I can if it is called from a field change event or page init, but for some reason not during an onclick event. If I set a timeout immediately to call a function to display the DIV, this will work, provided I call it immediately onclick and then set the timeout to call the function that runs the long script. This works, but everything is essentially forzen (I can't update the progress message -- can set the DIV text node but it does not refresh