Allow User To Customise Column Visibility, Width And Position In ListView?

This problem has been perplexing me for some time now and I've tried various methods of implementing this but all have failed or have been very messy. There must be a recognised way of doing this On a form I have a treeview and listview control. The treeview allows a user to select a node and the listview shows the items within the node - pretty standard stuff. The possible columns (or subitems) list for each item in the listview is big (20 different columns in total). Some users will want to show certain information whilst others won't. Users will also want to customise column location and widths.

Implementing the customer location and widths is easy enough using standard My.Settings variables to store and retrieve the information. The problem is allowing the user to select which columns they want to be visible at any given time whilst still allowing for access to the relevant subitems.

The only method I know to achieve this currently is to set Column.Width = 0. This is not a good solution because the user simply extends the column out again from the user interface. I need to hide the column properly.I've been told that using a repository cache is the way to do this. Unfortunately the person didn't describe this properly and so I'm still stuck at sqaure one. My database access is achieved using Linq to Sql.