Here's the problem you are facing. It is in the design of the contained objects and not the form. You are using an Event to do what you really need a method for. The Init and Load events fire at specific times during object creation. You want certain code to run dependent on an outside value. It is a design flaw to use an Event for this. Better design would be to give your controls a method and then call that method when your code is ready for it to run. Building in a dependency on the creation order of the objects will definitiely come back to haunt you alter.