>two things that make them real unprofessional are that you can't stop to think while typing search criteria in and you can't have a space anywhere in your search criteria.

You can easily code this logic yourself, Once you have it in your lowest level subclass everyone of your comoboxes should be fixed. Realize though that your "time to think" cbo behavior is going to be different than other cbo/lst controls that the user will interact with in other Windows apps. The control has a normal reset time after which it is assumed the user wants to start a different search.

>another pain was the developers inability to set the amount of rows / size of the results returned...

cbo is designed to be single pick only, that's kinda the definition of the control. listboxes are designed to support multiple selections. DisplayCount lets you control the number of visible items in a dropped list.