intermediate page call

I have a screen which is using the old style "ismap" image mapping and it calls an intermediate page in which javascript parses the "x,y" parameters and turns it into a "xval=x&yval=y" type parameter for php. In the intermediate screen, I have a liittle spinning icon that lets the user know that something is happening. While it takes no time to translate the "x,y" coordinate into more php friendly "xval=x&yval=y", the php page has to do considerable waiting for processing. In Safari & IE I see the wait spinner until the processing is done and then the php page writes the information. In Mozilla browsers, I see a blank screen with the intermediate page name in the tab until the php page writes the information. At some point, I resized the window while waiting for the php page, and suddenly, the spinning wait icon appeared. Does anyone know why this happens in Mozilla and how I can get the icon to appear in Mozilla based browsers? Like maybe force a minute page resize or something better?

- sharyn