Ok, I understand that was too long a post for anyone to be interested. But I think I know where I went wrong now.
"Well the problem lies in the fact that these (links) are dynamically defined, and not permanent web controls. When the page reposts, they are not recognized by the code because at that time, they don't exist, and therefore will not fire the event to execute the subroutine." http://aspalliance.com/110_Not_as_easy_as_it_seems_Webform_Dynamic_Buttons.2 Its because the controls that were created in the submit_search sub were dynamically defined. The problem is that I need to assign a certain value to index_sub, depending on the partno that the user chooses. To debug, i tried to hardcode index_sub.Text. When I did this at the web control level in the asp.net code, both the pcl and ecn forms worked fine. This means that indeed the error that was occuring before was because forms_Click was not being run upon the user click. So the error is in page.aspx and not in the other 2 pages. I still have not found the solution though.
