Thanks a lot!. Now I am wondering how did you figure out the fact that it is not initialized when its created? Is that a feature of the Shell.Explorer object. I dont believe this feature is documented anywhere on the developer site.

Here are a couple of things that I am still trying to figure out 1. I would like the "default" browser to be launched and not just IE. The user could have the default browser set to Firefox so naturaly Firefox should be launched.

2. What I really set out to do was to put an edit control with a button in the main panel. I am not sure if I can do that with gddWndCtrlClassEdit for the "main" panel. I am already doing it in the options window.

Basically I have a custom web application that does some application specific searching. Users log on to the web app and perform searches. I would like to make this little plugin allow the user to just enter a string in an edit box on the main panel, click a button, and the plugin will make launch the user's default browser with the query string in the GET request.

thanks for your help so far.

Asim