Have the script display an interim page (with a link to another script that will give you the results/status), but once you display the page you can then have the original script go off and do it's thing (recording results to a file). The second script i mentioned would read the results of the file and display them to the user. (if the script isn't done yet, there would be no results.

This is precisely what the program abstracted in my search in progress WebTechniques column does.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker