I found an interesting article on Rob Gruen’s blog that helped speed up the loading time of a user control. Apparently adding the following lines to the constructor of your user control resolves some deadlock in the framework related to a timeout looking for a new version I guess… This problem seems to be specific to hosting user controls in IE.

I’ve been using this for a while now and it seems to work well. A full explanation is available on his site.

   1:  System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("simple text")

   2:  Dim a() As String = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs()

Enjoy!