Shoutbox

If you are parsing the text to the MenuButton then can't you just store the string somewhere?  If you aren't parsing it then you can always just use the ActiveXObject Microsoft.XMLDOM (more information can be found here) to get the string in the node in the xml document.  I hope you can use one of these methods to fix your situation.

Sorry if this doesn't work, I haven't used that control before unfortunately.