I am working on a WinForms project which feels sluggish. It is composed of a literally hundreds of User Controls. If there is a piece of a UI functionality (even if not used anywhere else in the app), it's encapsulated in a User Control. I've gone through the project a number of times with the ANTS profiler and most of the heavy code appears to be in various control constructors.
Before I start ripping out User Controls, do they represent significant overhead to a WinForms application versus just laying out the form without User Controls (e.g. just intrinsic controls)?