Force labels within disabled user control to display as normal (not disabled)?
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I have created a usercontrol that I'm trying to use as the "tabs" on a custom UI that should operate much like a TabControl. (By "tab", I mean the bit that you click on, not the content of the page that gets displayed once it's been clicked). The tabs are on the left (as is common with properties windows in many applications), and each tab (ought to) consist of two labels, one atop the other (a title and description).

This has been a long and difficult journey so far, and my approach may be completely wrong, but what I currently have within my usercontrol is two labels and a button, all laid out in a TableLayoutPanel. The reason that I have a button is that I want the control to be a tabstop, and so (I think) I need to include a control that is a tabstop. Also, I want to trap certain keystrokes (see below). Visually, it's not too problematic to have the button, since I can use an image to make the button look nicer.

Anyway, I want the user to be able to move up and down the tabs using the up/down arrow keys. I've got this to work by catching the KeyDown (& PreviewKeyDown) event on the button. That's good.

However, if the user presses the Tab key while the focus is on a tab usercontrol, I want the focus to move to the first control in the current page, *not* to the next tab usercontrol, which is what it actually does.

To do this, I tried disabling the button in all tab usercontrols apart from the active one, but the focus still moves to the usercontrol itself - and since there's no active tabstop, it just gets lost (you can't see it). 

I then tried disabling all the non-active usercontrols rather than just the button, and this has worked a treat - except that now the labels in my usercontrol are shown as disabled, and I don't want that. 

How can I stop the child controls of my usercontrol from looking like they are disabled? (Alternatively, how can I get the tab key to ignore my usercontrols without making them disabled)?
