>FYI, I've attended several sessions on WPF. And I can't see using the technology at all unless you have excellent graphic design skills or have another person u can work with who is a designer.

Ok, thanks - just thought I'd skip the winforms and build on wpf, since I know neither winforms nor wpf

All I want, in the first stage, is subclass the base components - maybe change the appearance a bit and use them

Anyway - I'm reading 'WPF unleashed' and I'll see what I can do - you need .Net Framework 3.0 to be able to use WPF