Hi Bob, Thanks! I think I wasn't clear about it, though - I have no problem inheriting XPanel from Panel and adding child controls, but that's not quite what I want. XPanel has N child panels S1..SN, that could look like this: +-XPanel------------+ |...................| |.+-S1--+...........| |.|.....|...........| |.+-----+..+-S2--+..| |..........|.....|..| |..........+-----+..| |...................| +-------------------+ If the user of XPanel adds an instance to a form, I would like her to be able to add controls to XPanel.S1 or XPanel.S2, instead of to XPanel directly. Which is why I wanted to handle ControlAdded, so I could pass controls added to XPanel on to XPanel.S1 or XPanel.S2. Thanks again, Andy -- modified at 10:35 Monday 29th January, 2007 (got inheritance order wrong :)

The .NET 2.0 exams and certifications are out now. There are the MCTS and MCPD. Take a look here[^]. Steve Maier, MCSD MCAD MCTS

Hi Aryadip, That looks like it worked great. Wierd that there is no other mechanism to do this apart from setting environment variables... Many thanks for the help, Andy P.S. I had a funky day.

Well, I still don't know what the problem is. Maybe I could put the unmanaged DLLs in the global assembly repository (apparently a legal operation, not sure if it would work though). Anyhow, I followed the advice of one of my colleaues, who suggested I scrap my managed C++ wrapper class and use [DllImport]-ed functions instead (so I could specify the exact location of the DLL in the attribute parameter). This works just fine. Just to let anyone else with this problem know... Andy.