Perfect, thank you for reporting back bobonwhidbey.
I made a small error though
. It should read application.processmessage
s() (with a s attached to the end). But luckily you figured that out yourself :-)
Remember that the Lazarus GUI (whatever widgetset) is event-driven. That means that you can change any property you want but, in case it is affecting graphical display then a paint or redraw event is generated that needs to be processed by the application. As long as this message is not send to through the 'application' it simply will not update the graphics. Other ways to influence that is to call the paint method yourself (but that is not recommended, as each and every individual widget has its own peculiarities).