>Chad,
>
>Thanks for sharing your command button image strategy. I follow what you're doing to get your PNG images to display properly (very clever use of the image controls to "pre-render" the image correctly!) and will use a similar technique if we find a good source for PNG graphics (we currently use BMP images only).
>
>Your software must look great! Are you allowed to post screen shots? I'm always looking for great UI's to study.
>
>Thanks again for your help,
>Malcolm

Malcolm,

Apparently, I no longer have a place to post images. I'll be glad to email you a small piece of a screen shot that show the DashBoard I created. It works much like the Outlook style cool bar (or whatever they call it these days). You can see the shadow effect on the images and I've hovered over one of the buttons (Hot-Tracking style) to show the images with and without the button background. Once a choice is selected, a container is loaded onto the form and the DashBoard slides out of the way (or the user can have it just disappear if they want). It works great and looks pretty good. I'll send you the image (it's only 39K).

Chad