I hope I am posting this in the right place...

I am developing an application where there will be several forms with identical UI controls but each form will be catered to a specific type of data. Thus, I created a base form with all of the common UI controls: Panels, ToolStrip, ListView, PropertyGrid and StatusStrip and set all of their modifiers to protected.

The problem is when I inherit the base form, I cannot modify the ToolStrip or the StatusStrip in the designer but I can modify every other control! This is making adding new items to both strips and registering their event handlers a real pain. I can access and modify everything programmatically, but not visually!

Does anyone know why or how to fix this?

this was a limitation on VS2005 controls, old controls can still be altered at design time. i dunno if MS will change this on SP1