that wasn't what i was after. i firgured out how to do a part of it:
dateTimePicker.Format = Time
but dateTimePicker.Value still contains the Date, when i just what the time.
any ideas people?
Times always contain a date. It's a consequence of their being stored as a floating point number of days since some epoch.
You cannot remove the "date" portion of a date time any more than you can remove the 0 from 0.5
Just disregard the date, and use the time part. Given that you didnt bother to tell us how you wanted to use the time, we cant really advise, but suppose you want to know if the current time is after a time value chosen in a date picker:
Dim time as TimeSpan = DateTimePicker1.Value - DateTimePicker1.Value.Date
if(DateTime.Now > (DateTime.Now.Date + time))
MessageBox.Show("The current time is after the time entered in the DTP")