In creating a program recently, I wanted my VB 5 progress bar to show action, rather than percent complete. So I came up with a technique where I initialize:
ProgressBar1.Max=1000
Then in a later loop where I am displaying progress as I move through a file, my code says:
ProgressBar1.Value=X mod 1000
X is a count of records read from a file, which I have no way of knowing the number of records beforehand. This way, using MOD, I never have an out of range error in setting the progress bar value. Once the number of records is over 1000, then using MOD, the progressbar is reset to 0.