Don & Edward,

Thanks for your help. Some fool programmer named Robert left a call to the grid's init method buried in some code which overwote any change I made to the DynamicBackColor property !, Took me a while to set all my break points in the debugger to catch it, but a break after Ed's suggestion of a refresh(), showed the new colors taking effect, then after some more code was run they would flash back.

Dog chasing tail...

Thanks

Robert