controlling the Timer

There are a couple ways you can do this. Either put a timer control on your form or create it in your code. Either way, you can set the Enabled property to false until you want to start it. Then set it to true. Here is a tutorial on how to do so:

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/mahesh/WorkingwithTimerControlinCSharp11302005054911AM/WorkingwithTimerControlinCSharp.aspx[^]

In your situation, you would start with the timer disabled. Then, after your message pops up (or however it happens), you would enable the timer. After the set amount of time, the timer event would fire.

It is also good to note that the timer has a Start method and a Stop method. These do the same thing as setting the Enabled to true and false respectively.