I Agree, handling it in vbs is not advisable. What I'm thinking is to slave the VBS to be just a listener, it will check the status bar in a loop to see if it changed and if so it would alter a designated cell in excel and then we jump into excel native event of of cell change, from there the error handler inside the VBA will kick in.
I'm not sure about the stress that a VBS constantly reading the status bar will cause, will sure test it once I have a couple hrs