When I call and open up MapPoint from VB as a separate application and render a map, I occasionally get a 'Component Request Pending' and Switch To/Retry buttons. Is there a way to trap this in a more user-friendly method?

You should add the following two lines of code to your Form_Load:



App.OleRequestPendingTimeout = 10 * 5000


App.OleServerBusyTimeout = 10 * 10000



This first line returns/sets the number of milliseconds automation requests will run before user actions trigger a 'busy' message. The second line returns/sets the number of milliseconds during which an automation request will continue to be retried. Slower machines get caught in the cross-process messaging between the control and the MapPoint engine that is running in a separate process. Adjusting this timeout parameter should have no bad side effects and just allows for normal inter-process messages to have time to complete in the background. You could play with the setting up or down but I picked 10 (equals 100 seconds) as a safe number.