Hi folks,

This has been an occasional problem, apparently related mostly to
video drivers. (Yes, you read that right. In Win95 and its successors,
drawing to a theoretically device-independent bitmap relies on creating
a bitmap compatible with a display device, then using the driver for
that device. It's a bit of a programming nightmare.)

You sometimes find that a BMP made in, say, a 16-bit color mode,
will succeed while one made in a 32-bit mode will fail. There's some
discussion of this (including a couple of workarounds) at

http://www.projectpluto.com/faq_curr.htm#bmp_failure

It's a very annoying problem, but given the way Windows insists on
handling bitmaps, it's hard to see a way around it.

-- Bill