Mike,

You may try marking your inner objects as protected and see if your builder still works. If you do that, when you drop the class on a form, you shouldn't be able to "see" the inner controls (which is what you want). That's what I do when build complex controls. I (and many others, as discussed here before) find the control class to be useless.

HTH,
Chad

>I was also setting it in "design time" too, i.e. via the form designer :)
>
>The reason that I chose a Control control was so that I could hide all the "guts" and try to keep it as "automatic and simple" as possible for other to use by setting properties. With the container control, others will have to know what objects within it need to be setup before using it. Not too difficult to explain and do, but, just not as simple as I wish it could be.
>
>I have now got the same functionality duplicated in a container control that is setup using a builder. It works.
>
>Thanks for assisting,
>
>Mike