xml, my.settings? Which way to go?

After searching almost 3 days on the web I decided to post on here because I can't seem to find it on my own. My skills in Visual Basic are quite limited but I am learning.

My goal is to write a program that is able to analyse tests kids make in highschool. I have the first version done in VBA which works well, but I want to create something that does not depend on Excel hence the .NET version I am working on.

The way I see it I need to completely specify a test first. The year, the level, the amount of questions, the maximum score per question and a way to specifiy which of the questions belong to which chapters/skills. (For example, for my physics classes the chapters could be electricity/forces/pressure and the skills could be reproducing/insight/usage of formulas etc. The user should be free to specifiy these and later select which question belong to electricity, forces etc.)

After that there has to be a possibility to add a class to score every student on every question. It has to be possible to add more classes to one test, since it happens that several classes make thesame test. I can import the classes through xml since they can be generated from our school data base.

The read out of all of this is still in the far future...

So far I have a form which has some comboboxes, some radiobuttens, a textbox, and textboxes/checkboxes generated during runtime.

I need to be able to save the settings the user puts in, as they will define all the parameters of the test. It is exactely this saving part that is troubling me. I am in doubt on which way to go.

I have seen that some people use the my.settings way and save the settings in this manner. This seems like a nice option although I will have to research a bit into how to implement this with the dynamically generated text boxes and checkboxes.

On the other hand I have been experimenting with saving everything to one .xml file. I don't know if the .xml file format is handy for this sort of thing, it would have to contain tables of the scores, control values etc. If it is possible to have everything that I want in one xml file (test parameters and test results of no matter how many classes the user wishes to add) then that would be amazing. On the other hand, the my.settings seems like a simpler way to save settings, but then I would have to settle for a seperate .xml file that contains all the score data which the user would have to load into the program. I hope all of this makes sense...

Is there any sort of advice anyone can give me? Not really asking on how to code all of this, just struggling with the structure of how I wil implement the save and load functions of the app. If I can get that (save and load user input) it would start me off, but I am afraid to start the wrong way.

Thanks :-)