Sometimes I need to "idle" a focus away from a control, I use a little-bitty tansparent (not invisible) textbox control that I hide behind some other control on the form. When I need to loose the focus - I setfocus to the tiny textbox.

That Dragan - where would the digital rights cause of everyday form controls be without Dragan's advocations!:-)

>Hi Dragan,
>
>> How about showing some respect to the sanctity of the control with focus, and moving this transparent container automatically out of the way? IOW, in each control's .gotfocus(), add a call to thisform.CheckIfContainerIsCovering(this), which would move it away from the center of the form just enough to have the control with focus visible.
>
>I tried the technique of automatically moving the floating container and my users found it very disconcerting to have their status indicators moving around a form. To quote: It makes us dizzy.
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>You might ask why a user would want another object floating over the control with focus? Because many controls have lots of left over whitespace to accomodate max size inputs or data sets. Most of the time, this whitespace is not needed, and positioning a floating container over it maximizes screen use without interupting data input.
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>Hope that sheds some light on my specific experience. Thanks for the feedback.
>
>Malcolm