It's a known bug (since... 2005 or something, maybe even earlier) that will probably never get fixed. I've rarely used inherited forms, but in some cases they can be really useful. In my case I inherited from a dialog-like form, where there's two buttons in the bottom right corner. On all of the inheriting forms, the buttons were beyond the boundaries of the form and thus invisible. In that case I just set the button positions manually via code. You won't see the buttons during design-time, but during run-time they move to the correct spot.