Tracy,
Years ago we had to do this kind of thing and created an "extended" page frame. The idea is to create a second page frame in the init and use bindevent to get the dummy tabs to trigger the real tabs in the main page frame. Once that's done, you can freely set the visible state of the "dummy" tabs. The main pageframe should have showtabs set to false with the dummy tab positioned to make the set appear to be one control.

Hope that gets you thinking <g>

Regards,