Is there a way to gray out a text box and keep the text black, and not grayed out with the rest of the box?

There are two seperate places for this. Your toolbar should have a back color option and a fore color option. The back color is the background and the fore color is your text. set back color to grey and fore color to black should work.

If you used a rectangle around the text instead of changing the text box color you will have to send it to back but it would be best just to delete the box and color the background of your text box.

I mean is there a way to keep the text black in a grayed out textbox resulting from the textbox being disabled?

The only thing I can tell you is that when you disable the control, also lock the control. This is done by setting the Locked property of the control to True or Yes.

HTH
RDH