Multithreading And Status Bar - Simple "tasks List"

Haven't played with .NET for a while thought I would build myself a simple "tasks list" for work basically to "brush off the dust". Windows Form + MySQL

Now on form load I wanted the program to automatically try and connect to the DB. No problem except the DB connection always delayed the program launching by roughly 5 seconds. So I figured a separate thread call to take the stress from the form ... and now I'm floundering ....

CODE:

simple enough on form load display the dynamic text to the status bar label named dbStatus. Than start a new thread to the address of my database connection function. This works fine, i can even throw a msgbox() inside the function and can be told its connected. But in that same function I add the line

CODE:

Commented lines were me trying to reference it a "different" way ... but every time I run this the label never gets updated, when i step through set function the 'InvokeRequired' is either nothing or false.

But of course directly trying to access the text attribute of the label doesn't work but strangely enough doesn't throw a cross thread error either.

Hence my current dilemma ... I can directly call db.ConnectDatabase and everything works as intended .. when I throw the function into a separate thread my status label never gets updated, nor am I warned about any cross thread operations.