Actually setting up for reusing the object wasn't a problem at all, I had that pretty much sorted. In fact I went even further than that in breaking it down into functions, and FF2, FF3, Opera9, Moz1.7, NS8, IE6 on XP, IE7 on XP, Safari on Windows were all quite happy.

I had a problem with IE6 on Win2k hanging because the request object was never going into a "loaded" state (ReadyStateValue = 4), so it would never release the HTTP connection, and because IE only has 2 connections it can use as soon as a second call was made the browser could no longer communicate with the outside world.
Turns out to be an "undocumented feature" in a version of wininet.dll.
Eventually found it in this thread -> http://www.csschat.com/showthread.php?t=9858

I'll probably document my trials and tribulations sometime during next week.

Originally Posted by soap

I want to be able to click any one of those and load a certain page with a certain source in the iframe without having to make 30 pages each with a different starting source of the iframe. What would be the best way to do this?

	function swapSRC(p_sURL) {
		document.getElementById("ext").src = p_sURL;
	}

<iframe style="height:400px;width:500px;" id="ext" src="http://www.yahoo.co.uk"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<span onclick="swapSRC('http://www.google.com/')">Google</span> <span onclick="swapSRC('http://www.msn.com/')">MSN</span>

Just keyboard bashing not actually tested BTW

Or you can put the URIs into an array and call the function with an array index
That way lets you build the URL list and the nav spans (or any element of your choosing) server side rather than hardcoding them.

Do take note this is highly SE unfriendly and pretty much inaccessible to many assistive UAs.