Hi Luiz,
Thanks for the code, in fact I was not using those and after adding it to my base form class it does speed up things a bit.
Still it does not make sense in .Net to have all these nice themed controls and not been able to get it to display normally without a lot of tweaks.
I hope .Net 4 and VS2010 improve this process.
I attached a screen shot of one of my forms which have the following controls:
A PanelManager with 2 pages
A ThemedSplitContainer to host the Card List
Another ThemedSplitContainer to handle the Top and Bottom section.
A TableLayoutPanel at the bottom right
2 ThemedStatusStrip and 2 ListViews
Several labels and textboxes and in the Page2 of PanelManager (not shown) several ThemedGropuBoxes
Loading the data is very fast, it is just when opening the form the first time that it takes a noticeable time to show the first page.
About your Close button disappearance, since I am not using DevExpress I have not idea what my be happening.
All my forms are based on the SF StandardForm using the logic in StrataFlix.
Edhy Rijo