I created a form in MS-Access and noticed, after a little while, that a ComboBox would not render properly.

The problem is pretty simple, I marked the combo box as having a Normal Back Style. When I first open the window or when I click in that ComboBox, it works and renders the specified Back Color. That's great, but that's not exactly the solution, is it?

The box has a Fore Color of Black (that's the color of the text). That Fore Color is used because the background is expected to be either gray or green. Either way, black shows pretty well.

But the form background is blue (pure blue). So Black text over pure blue... that disappear big time.

I can assure you that my setup is correct. I have compared with several other ComboBoxes that work and they all like the same. Back Style is set to Normal and Back Color is set to gray. I open the window, or select something and exit that Combo Box, and the background color pops back.

I looked around the Internet and have seen only a few sites mentioning the problem and no solution yet. So I guess that's a bug in (at least) MS-Access. It happens on Windows XP, according to a website, it was not happening under Vista. Not too sure that's really true, he may just not have used the system as much under Vista.

Also I'm using the system remotely, the other people did not mention such and therefore I will eliminate this potential problem especially since the problem only happens with Combo Boxes and not all the widgets.

If I recall my C++ development with Combo Boxes and other such widgets, the way to make them look transparent is done by asking the parent window its background color and use that as your background color. Not transparent per se, but it looks as such to the end users. The code to do that with a Combo Box must be bogus...

Note that the drop down itself is of the right color each time. So we're good on that one.

The following shows you two Combo Boxes one that works and one that's broken...