Screen Refresh (possible?)

Hey all, I've run across a situation that doesn't seem to have a resolution. I hope I'm wrong about that. If I have a memory/cpu intensive process running in one of my scripts (intensive enough to keep calling set_time_limit to keep it going) then I am unable to print results/updates to the screen during the process. I have tried this with no success. Any ouput I attempt to push to the screen doesn't show up until the process is complete. What I'm actually doing is checking an email pop account. I would like to send a javascript call after every message downloaded (in another frame) to update a progress counter to let the user know what's going on. Without this ability a lot of users may think the script is failing or stalled and hit cancel or reload. The only point of reference I can come up with is writing a windows app in Visual Basic. You can cause a form to refresh during a process like this which will correctly update the form. Does anyone know of any way to get the same result in PHP for the browser? Thanks in advance, Toby