Adam,

 

FWIW, I figured out what was going on here.  A brief explanation follows.

 

My application is a CRM.  I'm using CE to allow my users to create mail merge type letters to send to their clients.  My application provides them with a number of letter templates that are shared by all our users.  Users can use these templates and make personalizable copies of them, but they can't edit the templates themselves.

 

To prevent this, I set the Enabled property to False and the ReadOnly property to True of the CE object when users are viewing a template, but the other way around when viewing one of their own customized letters, so they can edit them.  These properties are set in VB during a post back while retrieving the requested letter template.

 

Somehow, CE was not setting the ReadOnly property back to false correctly.  Some, but not all, functionality was disabled in CE until after I preformed a subsequent post back request (essentially a browser refresh) on the current letter.  Only then did all functionality return.

 

I have since stopped setting the ReadOnly property, since it does not appear to work properly, and my problem has gone away.

 

James