rob, good property/method documentation is a must in a user control.. you know the intellisense stuff..... well VB.NET doesn't support it (to make) directly, but lucky for us, one of the 101vb.net examples is an app that shows just how to do this...

also there are a bunch of attributes that you may want to define in your control... let me attach a control I use which is the system tray icon, but its enhanced to use balloon tips, the guy that wrote it did a good job on it.. and you could probably get some insight from it..

can you go into more detail about your collections issue? i tried to follow it, but got kinda lost