I've an app that reads/reloads existing GUI components from saved configuration previous execution for user convenience on next use that is called from the startup function and it has no trouble writing to the various GUI components.
Think would have to see the code and where the error is being generated and the message in context to have any idea what might be going wrong here, but your function as currently implemented seems to be trying to reference an object that is not in context or has been explcitly cleared previously.
One way that could be is that your data values to restore are referring to the .Value property of the component at the previous incarnation which will have been cleared and a new one created for the new invocation. To do this, you'll have to save the actual hard data values themselves to a file and reload from the data obtained by reading it on startup; anything from the previous incarnation is not accessible any longer--anything referenced to on the RHS with "app.XXXX" is probably no longer a valid reference.
