thanks. I don't want the whole menu tree to expand. I want to maintain the state of the menu as it was before navigating to different page. I found an example in these forums itself to maintain the list of nodes expanded in session state. I think this complicates the simple task of navigation. so I am sticking to iframe technique even though Iframe is geneally seen by many as a bad design. to get the status bar or image when loading the page in iframe, I am using a javascript function to load the page instead of setting the navigate url on the menu item. this way it is displaying a status bar in the browser when loading the page which is sufficient for my purpose. thanks for the tips about updatePanel and ajaxStart.

You can set WebExplorerBar's GroupExpandBehavior to AnyExpandable. This way the all the groups will be rendered expanded.
If you want to add a gif image when loading, you can use UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress. Another approach is using JQuery's ajaxStart and ajaxStop functions.

Regards,
Nikolai Dimitrov

I tried this already, but the webexplorerbar collapses to the root node everytime I navigate to a different page, how to maintain the state of the webexplorerbar when navigating through the site? so I reverted back to iframe. iframe option also has another issue. if page load is taking sometime, it is not clear to the user if the page is loading or nothing is happening. I am thinking of a gif image in the background, but not sure how to do. if I can maintain the state of the menu with master pages, that option can be used.