Actually, I've used the CMDITabs from this site and been very happy with it. What I want to do is shrink the tab control's width by some amount to make room for a drop down combo box. In other words, to make a control out of CMDITabs (essentially a CTabCtrl) and a CComboBox. What steps do I need to do? Should I use CMDITabs as a base, or use CWnd as a base and add both components. I frankly don't know where to start. Thank you.

2 problems are obvious: mwAarray is not declared. looks misspelled to me also, the function you are using needs a variable of type mxArray** instead of mwArray** which you are sending. It also returns mxArray* instead of mwArray* which you are trying to stuff the return into.

TranslateMessage() and DispatchMessage() are never getting called. Why? Because your while loop does nothing thanks to the common error of an extra semicolon. Your message pump is effectively: while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0)) ;