> (I haven't used SessionState yet, still struggling with ViewState)

Welcome to the club <g>...

The indiscriminate default use of Viewstate is one of the things that I really dislike in ASP.Net because it's so hard to figure out what actually goes in it. And worse, some things (like lists in particular) need to have it in order to behave 'forms' like along with all the data overhead they create...

Grrr.... just spent the last week building data controls that can live in most cases without viewstate (unless you change display things dynamically) and it's amazing how much hacking you have to do to get things to behave consistently.