I've done some reorganizing of my project recently and now I'm not seeing my tab bar controller, but its first view controller's view is appearing. Here's a breakdown of everything that happens prior to the problem.

App Delegate loads FirstViewController with nib. FirstViewController loads the application data from my server and then presents MainViewController with a modal transition. MainViewController is where the UITabBarController is supposed to be appearing. It's a very simple class.

The .h

@interface MainViewController : UIViewController <UITabBarControllerDelegate> {
    IBOutlet UITabBarController *tabBarController;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) UITabBarController *tabBarController;

@end

The .m

@implementation MainViewController
@synthesize tabBarController;

- (void)viewDidLoad {
NSLog(@"MainViewController viewDidLoad");


//set tab bar controller delegate to self
tabBarController.delegate = self;

// home view
HomeViewController *home = [[HomeViewController alloc] initWithTab];

// menu view 
MenuViewController *menu = [[MenuViewController alloc] initWithTab];

// special offers view 
SpecialOffersViewController *so = [[SpecialOffersViewController alloc] initWithTab];

// events view 
EventsViewController *events = [[EventsViewController alloc] initWithTab];

// info view 
InfoViewController *info = [[InfoViewController alloc] initWithTab];

//populate the tab bar controller with view controllers
NSArray *controllers = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:home, menu, so, events, info, nil];

tabBarController.viewControllers = controllers;

//release view controllers
[home release];
[menu release];
[so release];
[events release];
[info release];
[controllers release];

//add tab bar controller to view
[self.view addSubview:tabBarController.view];

[super viewDidLoad];
}

and here's the bit from FirstViewController that modally presents the MainViewController...

MainViewController *controller = [[MainViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MainViewController" bundle:nil];
    controller.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleFlipHorizontal;
    [self presentModalViewController:controller animated:YES];
    [controller release];

I'm not getting any compiler errors or warnings and the app runs swell... no crashing. It just isn't showing the darned TabBar, and it used to when I was creating it on my AppDelegate. I checked everything in my NIB and my outlets seem to be hooked up ok. I have no idea what's happened. Help!