>>Jeff (and Bruce, since you suggested a similar strategy)-
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>>I think this strategy is severely politically incorrect. If a user has his screen resolution set to 640x480, it is because that user wants to see everything large. He can go around his entire operating system and look at every application, and nearly all will have similar or identiacally sized textboxes, fonts, buttons, etc. Then he goes to your app, which just resized all of its elements to cram all the controls you deemed necessary to fit in the user's tiny screen. Now your app is the only app on the machine with small buttons and text. And the only app in which the far-sighted use has to squint to read the UI. The same goes for users with unusually high resolutions- I set my resolution high because I like to fit a lot of stuff on the screen. But your app just blew itself up to cover my valuable screen real-estate, negating all the benefits of my huge monitor.
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>>Is this really what you want to do to your users? Didn't they make the size decision when they set their resolution in the first place?
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>I'm not quite sure what you mean, Erik - What I'm saying is to design at 640, and then enlarge for higher res. As it is now at 640, without resizing, people need to squint to see at 1024. It doesn't require huge enlargement of forms/contained objects, such as to fit the entire screen at 1024, just enough to make it more usable.

My point is, if people are not squinting at your application unless they are squinting at all other applications in Windows, and the cure in that case is to lower the resolution. And people with low resolutions don't want your app to shrink down so they have to squint.

From my experience, the only people that use high resolutions are the ones who prefer it, and by changing your screen element sizing, you are ignoring the preferences that they have already expressed.

As near as I can tell, most of the textboxes and dropdowns in Windows itself, as well as other MS and popular applications is about 23 pixels high, and the standard font size is 9. Users make their resolution decision based on the ease or difficulty using/reading these standard controls. Who am I to rock the boat? Why should my app be the only one on their entire machine that uses its own screen element sizes?