How does it work?

VLMenuPlus internally keeps a map of menu item caption and the corresponding help message string and bitmap. It is important to understand what is stored as caption of the menu item.

In VLMenuPlus control, the caption means the text without & (ampersand, used typically for specifying the menu hot key), & (ellipses, used typically for indicating a dialog) and the text corresponding to shortcut key combination. Also, the caption used will be case insensitivity. For example here are a few samples of the menu caption as seen in the UI and the corresponding caption internally used by the control :

As seen on UI	Actual String	Internal representation
Open	O&pen	OPEN
Print&	&Print&	PRINT
New&	&New&   Ctrl+N	NEW

Even though internally it uses a clean caption, you don't necessarily need to specify a clean caption. You can specify any of the three forms as shown in the example. The control will automatically translate them to the internal format.

Also, remember that the control will always report the clean caption in the events.