Disappearing fileld in Design view

[chris_ri]

I've spent the last couple of weeks gradually aquiring information from these pages to help me complete a CRM type application for my wives business using Base and MySQL (odbc driver). The main form involves many subforms and where underlying db schema uses link tables to model many to many relationships. All is progressing (with much help from Drew Jensens tutorial), however there is one recurring problem which appears to be getting worse. In Design view many of the labels/controls do not show up on the form. They still exist, if I click around the form a rectangular selection highlight is shown and if I run the form the field appears correctly. The problem is to arrange the form correctly and be able alight controls I need to see them.
Has anybody seen this problem or know of a workaround?. All suggestions (related to the problem at hand) welcome.

All the best

Chris