Thanks for the clarification ("Access/Assign were simply not designed to work at design time").

As for "This could make for a pretty funky design environment if your assign method had runtime dependencies, so I think that decision was a wise one." well I've opened up a VB project that I haven't worked on since November. Can't for the life of me remember how it all works, but I am reassured (well not actually) to see comments like "not at design time" in custom controls, in otherwords I'm pretty sure that user-created VB controls are running "for real" when used in design mode (eg dropped onto a form in the form designer). The big catch is that you can't debug VB controls when you drop them onto fox forms!
Dave