>I agree with you and your approach. If it was such a hard and fast rule that option buttons should be only vertical, one should never change a button's background color, etc, etc. then why does MS give us the option to "break" them. For a long time we VFPers could not change a button's background color while the VB developers could. Suddenly (in VFP8?) we are given a button background color property. Why? I'm not complaining. I'm glad they did it.

Because its OK to break the rules WHEN you know why the rule is there and when its OK to break the rule. In general, you really should adhere to the Windows standard (Oxymoron Alert!)