I didn't mean it to be a trick question

This isn't about how to get something to disable when the BO idling, but how I would implement this sort of thing myself. This probably should have gone into the .NET forum.
So, the question again...
I have a button with a label to its right. The button is small, no text on it. The label is used to identify what the button will do (the text is very long for most of these buttons). E.g.
[button] Label text next to it.
If I disable the button, there is no UI clue that it is disabled (because there is no text on the button). Instead, I'd like to change the label, "gray it out", to show that the button is disabled.
As I'm still fairly clueless about .NET and how to do things, I've no idea how to do this. Where the BO/edit state comes in is simply that BOs manage this sort of thing and I figured I could learn from it

That make more sense?