Well this is part of the internal design of a particular component so I dont really want to hook the applicationComplete event and the component could be used in other situations like instantiated from code rather than mxml, I had assumed that run during initComplete would work in all cases but looks like it doesnt.
I could hook the creationComplete event which fires after the first validation cycle has finished but I was trying to avoid that becuase the component will have then been drawn and effectively I will have to invalidate it and start over again. On the other hand maybe I need to override commitProperties... Basically this was why I was trying to understand exactly when bound properties get initialised. tks
