>Never mind. Answered my own question. Funny though that the back color of the shape seems to affect controls outside of that shape.

Yes, it seems odd, but what actually goes on "behind the scene" is not necessarily what we visually witness in GUI. Really, GUI is all tricks with virtual reality to achieve a perception of reality...

Enough philosophy -- additionally, what I recommend when making this fix is to automate the shape/container backcolor to pick up the text backcolor in code. Otherwise, you may have a user with yellow editable text background, and if your shape/container backcolor is hard-coded to white, you will still have the problem. So you can do something like set shape.backcolor = textbox.backcolor in the form Init() to avoid that problem...