Web Forms :: Unique Id Not Being Set Early Enough On User Control?

I have a UserControl (basically a custom menu) that has some properties on it that I store in the view state. My pages may have multiple instances of this control, so to keep the values unique in the ViewState I concat my names with the control's UniqueId. However, when the properties are set the UniqueId does not exist yet, it returns the control's ID, in the case below, mnuFormNote. So then later when they are read it doesn't return the correct value because later the UniqueID is set so it attempts to read from a different ViewState location.

So, my question is am I doing something wrong or just missing something? If not, is there a way around this?

[Code]....

So when the page loads, and ShowEvents is set to False the property set actually does this: ViewState("mnuFormNoteShowEvents") = False. But later, when I attempt to Get the ShowEvents value it is doing this: ViewState("ctl00$ctl00$mstrContent$iepointMasterContent$dlForms$ctl00$dlStudentForms$ctl00$mnuFormNoteShowEvents"), which is nothing, so it returns the default of True. I need this value to be unique.