>Haven't had an image on desktop in years - not even icons - but now that I tried, it seems that XP will accept only .bmp! I seem to remember W2K used to accept .jpg... or were they converted behind the scenes?
>
>I know that bmp is Microsoft's favorite format because it's not compressed (one of the reasons the HW manufacturers have always loved Windowses - they always needed more horsepower and storage). But what was the Active Desktop... a web page, right? And what were the webpage formats all about? JPG, GIF, PNG, right?
>
>So, what gives? The file selector in the desktop properties dialog won't show any file but .bmp, period.
>
>XP SP1, using bbLean/TotalCmd/Launchy instead of WinExp.


I can select ANY image to be a wallpaper on my XP box. (I don't care that after that XP converts it to BMP) :-)
Unfortunately I can't test this right now. I have only Server 2003 here.

Oops! My XP was with SP2 on it.