The only time I've seen this is when you are putting things on the stack instead of allocating on the heap. However, if you are doing a new, that's probably right... Your code is virtually identical to mine so I'm at a loss. The only other thing I do differently is also set a font right before setting the color, but I doubt that has anything to do with it. You are only setting the AxisScaleDraw once, right?
Joey
Bookmarks