ParentForm Statusstrip Label Update By Timer

i have a MDI application with parent and childforms.

i have a global timer in a module that makes a com search and writes the result to a parentform status strip label.

the problem is that the label do not change.

i have tried the following:

1) on timer.elapsed

parentForm.statusstriplabel.text =...

2) to create a delegate and invoke a parent form function

3) to create and raise an event

although all 3 seened to run the label didn't changed.

the timer was created in a different module than the parentform class for many reasons.

one of them is because i want to access the timer.start , timer.stop from all the childforms

when i tried a local timer to paretform worked perfect but i couidnt start and stop it from the childs