Re: Label Transparent VB.NET
Is your button IN the panel or OVER the panel? A label in the panel, when the background is set to transparent, will actually have a background color of the hosting container (or whatever the 'background' is).
Basically, transparency isn't what you think it is. When you set the background color to transparent, whatever is drawn on the background of the parent container is drawn into the background of the label.
I don't think there is an easy way of doing what you want, and most methods are a hack. Simply, if you want unaliased text, then you can do it easier (regions), but aliased drawing/text requires some bitmaps and painting. Perhaps WPF (windows presentation foundation) has some methods that can do this?
Re: Label Transparent VB.NET
Just to add to what SJWhitely says - this is totally different to the behaviour in VB6 which I guess is what you are alluding to in your title.