That puts a different light on the subject
I don't think I realised you had label control you were attempting to merge with the image.
Once again however, I have done a very similar thing in the app I referred to earlier. I didn't use controls however, I simply BitBlt'd the text (called an annotation) onto the image. At that point, my app would save the image and should a user wish to remove the annotation in the future, they were out of luck. If I had wanted to I could have stored the image and annotation seperately however my app was involving live video capture during a laproscopic procedure and it was VERY important that should an image produced from my system be emailed, there was no chance of the serial number of the image being mixed up due to some stupid database error.
To cut a long story short, you can BitBlt the text you want onto the image, then if AutoUpdate is set to true, the merged text is part of the image. If you need to, store the text seperately so that if the user changes the text, then you can recreate the image again.
Oversimplifiying I know, but from the sound of your posts you know what you're doing (more so than me no doubt).
I would offer my actual classes however I am in the process of negotiating a sales/marketing deal and I would hate for any part of the code to be inadvertantly put into the public domain. If you need more details though, I would be happy to cut and paste the few lines at the guts of the code.
Regards