>I'm not sure about a couple things regarding how some of my forms are acting when running from the executable outside of the development environment. First, I have a login in screen that requires a mouse click in order to give it the focus. Also, is it usual for each form that is opened to show an occurrance in the task bar?

Each Top-Level window has an entry in the system TaskBar; you can create all but the first one as In Top-Level Window (ShowWindow = 1 rather than ShowWindow = 2)