Hi Dave,

Thanks for confirming what I'm seeing and for your explanation of why it occurs. I was hoping to avoid the toolbar route as my message containers are transparent with a bunch of shapes and images - the net visual effect is very pleasing. Going to the toolbar approach leaves me with a boring square again. I recognize that there are Windows APIs I might use to convert a toolbar (via its hWnd) to a non-rectangular window, but I'm guessing that this may be a lot of effort as I would have to trace around all my existing shapes and images some of which can be dynamically positioned.

I'm going to dwell on this some more ... still hoping there may be an out-of-the-box technique out there that might allow me to continue to use my container based message system ...

One idea I have - not fully thought out - is the possiblity of floating a transparent toolbar window over my container where the size and position of the transparent toolbar window would match the underlying container. I believe there's a Windows API that takes a hWnd and makes it transparent.

Anyone see any holes in that idea?

Thanks again for your post, Dave.

Regards,
Malcolm