for anyone who this might help in the future:
After much reading, I finally figured it out. The answer is that you use ASP "QueryString" to do this. In the link that you want to control frames with you put somehing like:
<A HREF="Frames.asp?myVariable1=somepage.html&myVariable2=otherpage.html>myexample</a>
this will pass value2 and value3 in the querystring found in the address window to whatever page comes next, in this case "frames.asp"
The trick is to remember the "?" and that means whatever comes after it will be passed in the QueryString.
Then, on frames.asp page, you do something like this for each frame you want to specify the source for:
<frame src="<% Response.Write (Request.QueryString ("myVariable1"

)%>" frameborder="NO" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" name="frameSide" scrolling="NO" noresize>
Two relevant postings can be found at:
thread333-75292 How much more water would there be in the ocean if it weren't for sponges?