When you save a form as a class you have created a form class, the contents are instances of the class that you created them from. When you instantiate a from the form class the contents are NOT subclasses of teh controls that are in the form class. They are simply instances of whatever class they derived from.

You are beginning to see why it is not a good idea to save forms as classes. If you want a fomr class then decide what needs to be in it and create the class heirarchy for those things, finally create a form class and put instances of the control classes you created in th form class. Or you canc reate the form class and then create a form from it, put the control classes in the form.