What I'm trying to acheive is a 'clean' way to create this:

A page where a user can see 'live' text, beit chat or a response to an update in the database without refreshing the whole page - and they should only be able to see anything relevant from after they got onto the page...
My dirty way around this would be an iFrame refreshing at regular intervals with the time the user got to the page stored in the database and only responses after they got on the page displayed

There's a couple of problems with this approach - one it's ugly and two it's probably unneccesary... I'm thinking there has to be a way around this using AJAX? One thing I do wonder taking away the iFrame thing though is with interactivity - people need to be able to interact with the database through forms at the same time - on an iFrame that'd be nice and simple, I guess at worst if the main part was done in AJAX forms could always be added to the page in iFrames...
My real problem here is that my useful knowledge for this ends at vbs, so getting any AJAX working is a bit tricky... I know how to do it in plain vbs with an iFrame but it's... undesirable lol and I'm not sure I could translate any of an asp page used in an iframe to AJAX as from my understanding you can't really use vbs as a backend with AJAX.
any suggestions are more than welcome :) I know it's a little vague, sorry heh, hopefully you can sorta see what I'm trying to acheive<

you can use whatever you want as a backend with AJAX, AJAX is a javascript based clientside push technology it really has nothing to do with what language you write your backend in.
just google for AJAX + classic ASP
try here http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajaxed-ajax-for-classic-asp for a start.<

thanks huw i'll have a play around this weekend :)<