@ rockmurali - im using 4.0 Framework
@ arjay - thanks you gave me some ideas: but I don;t know how to check the control for a child control so I just dragged another ColorDialog directly onto Tab 1, and named it colorDialogTab1 - and this still does not work. Additionally I've tried dragging the colorDialog directly onto the main form.

I am not doing anything but ShowDialog(), so there are no hidden dependencies... I will open a new project and test this again.