Brian,

The IDE instantiates the class in order to render it in the Designer.

>No, I haven't done that. But my problem is at design time, not run time. The custom control will not render itself in the webform designer when I used the previously mentioned code. I believe it will work correctly at run time anyway, but the fact that the control won't render make it much more cumbersome to use. Maybe it's a bug in the VS.NET IDE.