>After the period? Very strange. The snippet of code I posted shows the error that you are seeing and I cannot think of any other possible cause. But even if Shell was an empty class you should still be seeing the .Equals and .ReferenceEquals methods.
>What does the compiler make of 'Dim s as Shell' at that point..

Shell alone doesn't get intellisense. But, if you type the parenthesis after, you can see that it responds to something. That is the reaction I have when I use it into the project where it is working. But, if I use it in the DLL project, where it is not working, I see that the intellisense doesn't work also but, on that one, the parenthesis doesn't either. However, Shell appears as a recognized word in the list.