How to keep the refrence of "internetexplorer.application" after navigate in ie8

Hello,
i have a problem with the IE8 "internetexplorer.application" object, i want to use following code as it works until ie7 to print a html site in javascript (or vb)

  IE = new ActiveXObject("InternetExplorer.Application");

.
.
.
  with (IE) {
    Navigate(HTMLFile);
    Visible = false;
    while(ReadyState != READYSTATE_COMPLETE) sleepms(200);
    ExecWB(OLECMDID_PRINT, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER);
  }	

It works on vista with IE7, but not on Win7 with IE8.

The problem is after IE.Navigate executed i lost the reference to the IE Object, i try to use "Navigate" with flags

navOpenInNewTab
navOpenInBackgroundTab
navVirtualTab

But nothing helps, i always lost the reference, checked with the deugger, after IE.Navigate they show me a "empty" reference..

Any suggestions on that ?

Thanks a lot
regards
Marcus