Visual Studio- accessing Smart Tags without help from Design View

I mainly do C# ASP.NET projects in VS2010. Once you've put m开发者_运维知识库asterpages and other things in place, I find the design view pretty much goes grey and elements can't be selected. This isn't so bad except that sometimes you need to access the little 'smart tags' at the top right of controls to do things.

In particular I'm trying to do this with some telerik controls, though the issue isn't confined to them.

Anyone have a handy tip to access this functionality (or miraculously make design view work!) ?

Thanks!

PS. I read in a few places that Shift-Alt-F10 may help. I tried putting my cursor in the control's tag and using it, no luck. Also I clicked the little rectangle below design view to select the control and tried it again- no luck.

Yeah, searching for VS design-time troubleshooting tips in the asp.net forums or MSDN is probably the best start to identify and eliminate the abnormal behavior.