Malcolm,
>Any ideas appreciated!
Ok you said
any ideas.. this does seem to work.
You can test to see if the scrollbar is active by using the thisform.Point() method. You can look to see if the up pointing triangle is black or gray. For example I put an edt on a form with a width = 138, left =-1, top = -1. debugout thisform.Point( 125, 8 ) will be 0 when it's black and thus enabled, or 8421504 when disabled.
Now these coordinate values will depend on your particular scrollbar metrics sysmetric() will help with this part. Themes probably play a part so you need to look for a change in value of the Point() than the actual values.