I am trying to find a way to handle webservice responses that are too large... currently it errors.  Is there a way to stream the response back in chunks?

Somehow the updatepanel seems to manage, but using the script manager with a webservice fails if the response is too big. 

If the response is json-serialized, you can set the maxJsonLength attribute in Web.config. It's likely already in there in a commented out element. Change it to something like:

<jsonSerialization maxJsonLength="500000">

(It's in the system.web.extensions section.)

We just had to tweak this yesterday for some oversized web service results.

Donnie

I've set it to a higher number, which helps, but at times, the response is so large that the browser prompts that the script is taking too long, and lets you stop it!  Ideally I would like to be able to retrieve data in blocks, so the browser doesn't just hang on a large result...     

Sounds like you might need to implement some kind of paging return mechanism in your web service; e.g. "return page 3 for a page size of 100".