>I have traced the sequence from menu click to the form instantiating and there is no hitch - in the development version.

Exactly - which is why you need to use the wait windows, recompile, and run the exe/app version. Put the wait windows in the click method of the menu bars, and if they appear in the exe, then you can probably isolate the issue to somewhere in your forms.

At that point, add wait windows to the various methods of your forms (i.e. init, load, etc) and recompile, so you can isolate within the forms. Debugging within the EXE is like debugging com - it's not easy. This is the way we had to debug before there were debuggers.