>It looks like VFP7 does NOT respect the transparent setting in the GIF but 8 does the right
>thing. Making white the transparent colour solved the issue for GIF's.

Good, I'm glad I was able to help.

>Does not work for BMP's though as they do not have this transparent attribute. Anyway that is easy to solve by changin the BMP's to GIF's.

That's probably the easiest solution: I think you can also solve it by creating an MSK file with the same name as the BMP. Fill in the parts of your MSK with black which you don't want to be transparent, and leave the transparent parts white.