Thanks George! I appreciate your response on this.
OK, we did not set the 'Highlight on Focus' property to Yes, after making the change, it seems to be working on the first load of the panel, but when I try to trigger it with a button, the same code doesn't seem to work, which is strange.
Actually we are trying to use the source code to set the background color of edit controls regardless if the control has focus or not, so I changed the code to use 'HM_SETBKGNDBRUSH' and this seems to work the opposite to 'HEM_SETHILITEBRUSH', it doesn't work when the panel is initialized, but it does when I trigger it from a button event.
For what we need, I set the 'Highlight on Focus' back to No, and used 'HM_SETBKGNDBRUSH', it works correctly for both panel initialization and event trigger.
Once again, thank you for your help, George, and Happy New Year to you and yours!!
Best regards,
James