It's me, hopping in the discussion again. A bit late but I was away for a while.

Yes, what JMik is saying (and we all agree off, I guess) is that images appear washed out. There are a number of different situations for the images to show up in a menu. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Here are my findings so far:

1) I use standard 16 color BMP's in a PictureBox and use 192-192-192 as the gray background. This looks good on a default NT 4 color-scheme, but looks weird on a Windows 2000 or any different color scheme.

2) I put images in an ImageList, use vbMagenta (255-0-255), or any other "default-color" as a background. I use the MaskColor of the ImageList, then either copy the images to a picturebox at runtime, or use the .Picture property of the ImageList directly to get the images in the menu. Both situations lead to an image in the menu with a vbMagenta or other "default-color" as the background: so none of these methods seem to work. It looks like VB is completely ignoring the MaskColor property when it concerns menu's.

3) I use images with a white background. At runtime, the white is replaced by the current 3D Object color (ButtonFace in VB, I guess). This method comes closest to the end result, but unfortunately, a mask or a filter is applied to the image, making it indeed look a bit "dirty". Colors like bright yellow turn out a brownish yellow.
Besides: it's not possible to have any white in your image. Any color close to white (i quote JMik: "Say 250, 250, 250") is changed to the ButtonFace color as well.

For all three situations I used 16, 256, and 16.7 million color BMP's and I used GIF's as well.

I've been looking around at some other forum's and newsgroups, but it seems very hard to answer this "simple" question:

"How does one create menu-images whose background adapts to the current color-scheme: that is: ButtonFace in VB, or 3D Objects in Windows. I know it must be possible, because all of Microsoft's products support this feature.

Anybody??

Imar

P.s. Thank you all for your help so far.