>David,
>
>>It is as though the label is looking at the color of its parent (the container) and matching it but not taking into account that its immediate parent might be transparent and so it should look for the color of its parent's parent (the page).
>
>So why not have your container class grab set it's BackColor to the first non-transparent parent that it can find walking it's way back to the form? A few lines of code in your base container class Init() should solve the issue.
>

I wish I could!

Assuming you are using the standard WinXP color scheme - the backcolor of the page class returns RGB(236,233,216) regardless of whether or not themes are turned on. This is actually the beige color that you get without themes, it is not the much paler color that pages get shown in when themes are turned on.

The only solution I have found so far is to disable themes for the pageframe and put up with having 'old style' pages without the XP features.

David