Ah ok, so I did some digging around and it seems this behaves strangely. Have a look at this thread...
http://www.devnewsgroups.net/windows...ial-focus.aspx
It looks like the Focus method doesn't work during the load part of a form, but does later. I couldn't seem to get it to work unless I put my button's focus on the event of another button's click. I speculated you could also trigger a timer on a form load event to set the focus after a few seconds, but I didn't try it... seems wishy washy anyway.
What
did work was putting this in the form's load event...
- this.ActiveControl = theButton
This seemed to work for me... I have no idea why it's different than the focus call. Alternatively you could set up the tab indexes on your form so that the appropriate button had an index of zero.
Hope that helps!