I am converting an old 1.1 .NET Windows application to 2.0. The conversion wizard claimed success, but one of my user defined controls (only one of several used) is returning "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". I used to get this in VS 2003, but as it didn't seem to effect anything I ignored it. VS 2005 won't let me use the form designer, however, which makes it very painful to change the form.

What more does VS 2005 need to eliminate this warning and let me use the designer?

I figured this one out. The user control was defined to the forms, but a global object referenced by code in a property in the user control is not initialized until run time. The forms that referenced it were trying to set a value for the property in the form initialization code and were getting an error trying to display the object in the designer. I placed the global object reference inside a try/catch and the problem went away.