>The "why" of all of it makes sense, it's just difficult to understand all the various events and when they fire. Actually, this is a reason why a lot of people like the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Adding the controls are easy enough, it just doesn't make any intuitive sense that you have to reload them on each page hit, just to unload those same controls a second later (just to make viewstate happy). Instead of:
>
>- Page is hit, load control 1
>- User clicks on something
>- Postback, in response to click load control 2
>
>You end up with something that looks like this:
>
>- Page is hit, load control 1
>- User clicks on something
>- Reload control 1
>- Postback, in response to click unload control 1 and load control 2
>
>It's just weird.

Agreed.