VS 2008 (De)Serializing Multiple Objects Into One File

I am trying to create a load and save function for my customizable Menu/Tool/StatusStrip controls (see signature). Those three controls use a single AppearanceControl class, which is mainly just a large list of properties (Colors) which control the colors of the Menu/Tool/StatusStrip.

I want to be able to save and load the values of these properties so the user can store them and load others with ease. Serialization seemed the obvious answer, although I never used it before.

Now, there is a slight problem that I cannot serialize Colors, so I simply gave each Color property the XmlIgnore attribute, and created an Integer property that gets and sets the Color property (using Color.ToArgb and Color.FromArgb). This way I can serialize the color properties succesfully.

Then, there is another problem. The properties are not all in the AppearanceControl class. Instead, the AppearanceControl class has a large number of subclasses, which in turn contain the color properties.

As a small example, I may have this:

vb.net
Public Class AppearanceControl
Private _toolStripColorProperties As ToolStripColorProperties
Private _menuStripColorProperties As MenuStripColorProperties

[Code]....