mattmickle, when you activate the counter and have to hit ok, you are basically building in a delay between iterations of the loop. I don't know why you are getting problems, but have you tried just putting a delay in where the message box would come up with the counter? Not ideal, but maybe worth at least testing? If it works then at least you know it is a timing issue, and can move on from there... Something like 
Application.Wait (Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 2))
which would wait 2 seconds for each loop?