One way of doing this would be to emit a jQuery object that stores the module settings you'll need for communicating with the server. Then you could set up any handler/service on the server side to communicate with and just pass in whatever context you'd need.

A simple example off the top of my head would be to write something like this in your ASCX file:

var myModuleSettings = {
  displayProfile: <%= Settings["DisplayProfile"].ToString() %>
};

Ian

Thanks for the lightning fast reply Ian!  Unfortunately I can't pass the module settings I need to the client as they are actually login credentials for a third party service that takes http requests (the data they return is not sensitive but the login credentials obviously are)

Your second post looks interesting.  Will check it out.