Problems when controls created in button click routine

I start with an overview of the problems I am seeing:

I'm developing a Web page in ASP.NET with Visual Basic and .NET 4.0.  I'm having two problems:  (1) Sometimes contents of text boxes are not 'persistent' across post backs so that after a post back the user sees empty text boxes instead of what they typed in before the post back.  (2) Sometimes for some buttons the indicated style in my theme is ignored, that is, is not honored, used, or applied.

No doubt a key issue here is that I am creating some controls dynamically including some in a button click routine.  In particular, ViewState and the style and theme seem to be working fine until some dynamic controls get created in a button click routine.

I have some partial fixes:

First, for the 'persistence' problem, in the routine page_load, in the case of a post back I get the post back data from the property Request.Form in the page's instance of class Page and use tha ...