Thanks to those of you who offered insights on this issue. I resolved the issue by moving the calculations out of the refresh events and into custom methods. Then calling them specifically in the order needed. I suspect there may be a little more overhead with this approach but its simpler and more reliable as you suggested.


>>Suppose you have a custom container class which includes a variety of shapes, textboxes, and labels. Some of the properties of these objects are dependant on the values of other objects in the container. Thus we need to control the order in which the controls in the container are refreshed to insure the correct values are picked up. So my question is:
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>>How do you control the refresh order of objects within a container?
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>>Does the zOrder do this, or the tab order, or something else?
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>You should try not to rely on the instantiation or refresh order. For example, you could calculate the values in the Refresh() of the parent control - the container in your case.
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>On the other hand, yes, the ZOrder does change the order, not only of instantiation, but also of refreshing. In other words, simply sending a TextBox to back will ensure that it will be the first one to be refreshed.