>Just to see what was going on "under the hood", I dragged out Spy++ to have a look. The Explorer has both what we'd refer to as a ListView and TreeView control (in my setup). The class names of these are SysListView32 and SysTreeView32 respectively. I couldn't find anything that looked like an ImageList, however. By comparison the version 6.0 class name of the TreeView is TreeView20WndClass.

The ListView control is using ListImage control. So...

>I would suspect that controls used by the Windows Explorer are from the MFC, and those that we use are derived from them. That's just a guess on my part, however.

AFAIK, Win Explorer doesn't use MFC. Anyway, ListView and ListIMage are not MFC controls, but ActiveX controls. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is just a framework of classes (and wizards) for VC++ and can be used only from VC++. Of course, a dll or ActiveX built with MFC can be used from any other tool.

Vlad