>>you might try to set the page's backcolor property to your own disabled value...
>
>Why this would be necessary? I don't understand why that page looks disabled in design mode but like enabled in run-time. What would be responsible for this wrong appearance?

Maybe there is code somewhere that is overriding the design-time configuration at runtime?

I'd run into a few occasions where I had inherited some code where the original author for some reason thought it was a good idea to not use ENABLE or READONLY properties but to set up the behavior largely with WHEN events on the controls. Talk about confusing, since this basically meant there were no visual cues when things were disabled or enabled, nor when text boxes were read-only or not.