Ok, I will try to abstract my solution from this problem as best I can and present a scenario of what I am trying to accomplish and see if anyone has some insight as to how I might solve this that is a win-win for end users and the server.
ASP.NET 3.5, Web Service on the back end, leveraging AJAX.
One portion of the site uses a heavily modified ActiveX control to provide VNC access to servers (internal tool).
When you try and connect to a machine that is offline, it will (by proxy of the web service) start it and the user will see a AJAX progress indicator letting them know what is going on.
Once the machine is online and accessible, the progress indicator is replaced with the ActiveX control and the user can interact with the machine
This all works great, except...
The test for the machine being online takes place during a post back event in page load where there is a loop that tests for whether the machine is online (success ...
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