I don't have an answer, but I've found the following helpful in understanding View State and the ASP.Net page lifecycle.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972976.aspx

>Hi everybody,
>
>I have a drop down list on my page and a FormView inside the MultiView control.
>
>The combo's value is an input Control parameter.
>
>I set the drop down list to disable the ViewState and I ran into the problem of passing the wrong value as an insert parameter.
>
>I'm wondering about the best ways to solve the problem apart from manipulating EnableViewState property in code (the simplest solution I'm going to implement for now).
>
>Thanks in advance.