I have made owner-drawn windows without anything at all. Just the client area, and it was, like i said, owner drawn, so when the window appears, you dont see it, because it just reserves space on desktop, meaning nothing will draw thru it, and you paint the client area yourself. I used the CreateWindowEx function for it. Not child window, but application window. You have to play around with styles and extended styles Good luck. The reason I cannot post example now, is because i dont have the build environment and the compiler installed..