Randy,

>I didn't know the load event fired when you dropped the control on the form at design time.<

Yep, the Constructor fires, the Load event fires, another event called HandleCreated fires ... there may even be a few more but I don't know 'em off the top of my head.

~~Bonnie

>thanks for the help Bonnie, it ended up being a runtime error in my code. once i fixed the error, i didn't have any more problems. i didn't know the load event fired when you dropped the control on the form at design time. anyway, thanks again.