Tie a yellow ribbon round the containing form

I've been looking at alternate controls for rendering the ribbon.  The first alternative seems ok, but there's a bit of a functionality gap to do with the merging of ribbon items on child (MDI) forms.  On reflection I may have avoided the MDI model and tried to adopt the MVC/MVP model but this started as a fix for my problem and there's a lot of heavy lifting to go that route if you don't want to use the stock Microsoft control set.

Anyway, the behaviour of current set means that ribbon items are defined within the context of the form that implements the functionality - that is, the items for the summary functions are defined on a summary form, calendar ribbon items on the calendar form and so on.

Changing this behaviour means writing signaling code from the container figuratively "push the buttons".  In absolute terms this isn't a huge exercise but it's one extra handler for each button and I've got some further evaluation to do before heading down this route.

Apart from anything else, I may just end up substituting one problem for another.  I think what I may to is knock up a tiny interface with none of the features just to see if the same problems are experienced. 

Given the day job at the moment, I'm looking at the 3 week mark.

Have a good weekend.