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To tackle your last query first - if I have a grasp of what your talking about, but it all depends how you handle this behaviour within your application along with Windows settings. For instance, the number of these taskbar tabs that will be grouped is relevant to a Windows setting however your problem lies with the way your using forms, from what I imagine.
If a form is loaded and displayed, then depending on your property settings it will have a tab in the taskbar, hiding it will then remove the tab and I presume your hiding one form to show another hence the 'effect', on the other hand you may not be hiding the other form in which case my advice is to detect the form and bring it forward instead of displaying it again.
Loading all forms at run-time to hide\show as and when is really quite insane unless you have a reason other than one which is to display interfaces faster. You should strive to write code in such a manner that executing the code units to initialise and display a form is efficient as possible and not rely on a users memory.
The benefits of controls can be used to implement full-featured forms, but generally used to write elemental feature's which can be used widely accross the application, and even to be exposed to calling applications, such as a login dialog for a database for example. Another example is a custom control I had to write for a client this week, which was a folder browser control, this control is to be shown in mutliple places as its own dialog but in one circumstance it acts as a toolbar in an MDI container.
So for non-standard circumstances, including times where you are required to draw your own control, which is another good reason for custom controls, then do so, otherwise dont go through the effort, IMO.
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Mona Lisa must of had the highway blues you can tell by the way she smiles..
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