I have a form with about 30 panels on it, one stacked on top of another.  When it is chosen from the selection list, the panel is then made visible and brought to the front.  My problem here is that my form is taking something like 10 seconds to load because it appears that it is trying to draw all of the panels and their controls even though they should not be visible.  Is there something that can be done about this or something I may not be doing correctly?  I would think that drawing time should only be affected by what you can see on the form.  It sohuld not be trying to render panels that are hidden behind other panels.  Please let me know what can be done here.  Thanks.

This is kind of like asking, "how long is a string."  You need to find where your speed issue truly is and then go from there.  Yes you have a lot of controls on the form, but that may not be your primary issue.  When we run into problems like this we begin disecting things until we discover the slowness.  One good tool to help this is the Ants Profiler from Red Gate software (http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_profiler/index.htm).

This is why we created the Application Theme features in StrataFrame, so we have control of the application aesthetics and render time.  We are only using Infragistics controls for things such as spell checking textboxes and currency editors, etc.  Everything else we are using our own controls for our medical system.  To put into perspective, rewriting portions of our application that were using the DevExpress controls versus our controls (in conjunction with some of the Infragistics editors) was more than twice as fast loading and in some cases 3 to 4 times.  This was especially true for the first display of the control or form.  Does the same form come up faster the second time it is launched while in the same session of your application?  If so, then you definitely have assembly loading and rendering problems.

In short, we moved away from DevExpress because it dramatically slowed down the application.

I understand how you feel.  This is why you need to truly understand where your problems are.  It is frustrating, but it is better to correct a wrong now rather than down the road.  I am not saying the DevExpress is the wrong choice as they have some good controls and tools, but if you are experiencing very slow performance, it would be a good idea to think about this. 

You may also just want to think about how to restructure this form you have been discussing because I think that you have some design issues here as well that could be hindering performance.