I'm floating a status message container on top of my form. I float the container to the top via .Zorder(0). Looks great!

But when a user clicks on this container, and an underlying control has focus, it bleeds through the container, i.e. the underlying control actually becomes active and floats back over my Zorder(0) container! I've tried adding shapes and other (nested) containers to my message container to block this behavior, but without success.

Has anyone seen this before?

Is it by design?

Any workarounds besides using a window or form? I'm not using windows/forms for my status messsage because if a user clicks on these items their control will lose focus. A toolbar doesn't have this problem, but just looks ugly in this context.

Thanks,

Malcolm