Exactly what is the minimum functionality required to create a WebBrowser control is not well documented. Jeff Glatt's article Display a web page in a plain C Win32 application contains some ideas. It is based on Chris Becke's C++ sample in his file webhost.cab.

In WebSkel, the WebBrowser control has been given a file as a url, but it is possible to give it a stream of html code held in memory. See Jeff Glatt's article.