wysota, thanks for taking time to think about this.. You are correct that I need to run this code through a profiler. I'm currently looking for an appropriate one while our IT department drags its heels doing the same thing

While I suspected that the rendering was done on an as needed basis, as you suggest, I was instructed to try to separate the initialization from the rendering. I'll just wait until the profiler issue is resolved and this will show where the bottleneck actually is.

Although I suspect there are other forces at work here (not just the drawing) the show() suggestion doesn't work for me.

I tried a separate call to show() after initialization call (the one that calls ui.setupUi()); the tab was blank. I then moved the show() to the end of the initialization function with the same result, blank tab. Since profiling is what's really needed here I'll just work on some other 'highest priority' problem .

-m-