Cathi,
thanks a lot. This keeps me from digging deeper and wasting time . I really wasn't sure if I a making a mistake... I already read similar things in Rick Strahls article but wasn't sure if this comes from the same region...
Marcus
>There are known "issues" with the designer and inherited controls. My guess is that VS .NET doesn't have Form1 in memory when you work with Form2. It works sometimes because of how the memory is loaded in. I have seen this with the Toolbox before when loading custom controls. There really isn't a work around but just remembering the steps you take to have Form2 load properly. Hopefully, the next version will have this fixed.