It is my understanding that you can't do that until MainLoop anyway. So a solution could be to fork off an helping application, establish some form of IPC between it and your program and have it do the splash screen/scrolling status thing until the latter is finished.

Alternatively you may build a first, "presentation" GUI that does the scrolling status thing while collecting data from db access, then rebuild it with that data and update.

Whatever, be patient and I bet zentara will come up with a Nx (N a reasonably sized integer!) better solution and most probably actual example code!