Downloading component information timer window

Hi Everyone.

I would like to make the active-X install as easy as possible and feel that one of the big problems for losing customers is that when they first go to install the AX upload component there is quite a long delay as IE downloads the component before then asking the user if they wish to install it.

At this point since there is no information telling them that something is happening I think a lot of users get frustrated and just think that the page has crashed and close there browsers never to return.

What I propose is to give the user some more information in a floating div with an animated timer and message that gets shown prior to downloading the AX component giving the user some indication of something happening and then gets hidden once the install warning message appears.

However although i can design the window I don't know how (Or even if) I can trigger the show/hide from somewhere..

What is needed is an activex install detection to see if there user has already installed the component, a trigger to show the timer window and a trigger to hide it once the activex component has downloaded to the users machine prior to being prompted to install it.

Any information that anyone can give me and I promise to share anything I create, im sure somehow we can all come up with a really fail-safe way for users to install the software.

Possibly Useful but my aims are really to achieve the following -

1. Detect if the active-x component is already installed and only show "wait" window if not, wait window would have a message something like "please wait while our image upload software is installed into your browser".
2. Close the wait window once the active-x application has downloaded (Prior to the install) or change the message to indicate what the user should do next i.e. click the bar in IE etc)
3. Since the final part of the install requires a browser refresh the pop up wouldn't necessarily need to be closed using script, just not re-opened on the refresh.

Maybe someone else have implemented something like this?

I know I can detect the Active-X component just need to work out the scripting, would be nice it it was part of the iuembed.js though