>>>>Great explanation, Dan. Thank you! That makes things much clearer. I didn't think about the fact that once a control is placed on a form, it becomes an instance.
>>>>
>>>it is not true.
>>
>>But it behaves like one, in the sense that any custom methods or properties you add to it will not be persisted. They get lost.
>
>Fact that an airplane flies doesn't mean that it is a bird :)

Um, I have a correction here. I've added a property to a commandbutton on a form, and saved it. The property isn't seen on the PEM sheet, but it's still in the .properties memo in the commandbutton's record in the .vcx - it's that the new property isn't listed in the Reserved3 field. Adding it there manually didn't really help (maybe I should have compiled the class immediately after that). Anyway,as soon as I edited anything on the control (moved it one pixel left, then one right) and saved the class, the new property vanished from the .properties memo as well.

So, while this may be theoretically feasible to accomplish (i.e. we may find a hack which would do it), any such locally defined PEMs are about to vanish at any point, which makes their use good only for frustration addicts.