I live on an island and have 2 cars.  One is a classic Island Car that I use on the unpaved roads that lead to the nice beaches: the Ford Focus.  This car is right out of the Adam Sandler Song, Ode To My Car.  It often does unpredictable things (for instance right now the window doesn't stay up so I had to put a Pringles can in the door to hold it up).  Maybe the developers who worked on focus in WPF also had one of these beauties :)

Actually, I got WPF focus to work quite well for me, but only after getting a better understanding of Visibility in WPF.  WPF only lets you set the focus on a control if IsVisible = True.  I was adding a textbox to a control in code and the Visibilty property was set to Visible so I thought that I was ok.  However this is NOT the same as having IsVisble = True.  IsVisible is caluclated when the control is rendered as opposed to when layout is occuring so they are actually separate things.  The soultion is that in order to set the focus on a textbox control that you create in code you need to do it on the IsVisibleChanged event.  This fixed my problem and I know have control over my focus (for the time being) as expected.

Thanks to Kris' Blog for explaining this one!