Hi Martin,
...Is there a specific need for the need of BPM format with transparency? Can you use PNG ?...
I'm using Visual SlickEdit as my development IDE. Beyond something like Watcom, Borland C++ or IBM's VACPP, this is by far the most flexible way to cater to not just multiple C/C++ configurations, but also multiple languages.
As you can imagine our version (4.0b - c1999) is a bit old, and that only handles BMP images which can be used to customize the numerous IDE toolbars with. The newer versions on other platforms have switched to ICO images and PNG following that, we are stuck with BMP, and it has to be the OS/2 version as opposed to the Win one as well.
So I'm simply trying to add a few more customized options to the IDE's Toolbar, stuff that reflects our OS/2 specfic things. Now that I'm trying to do some updates to DISKIO and possibly porting stuff like fstrim, I figured I would bulk-up my IDE with the stuff I otherwise just used to jump to the CLI for, thus the need.
The good news is that the Toolbar has a consistent single-colour background, so if the BMP transparency is a no-go I'm just going to fill-in the otherwise transparent ICO background with the matching colour and save that as a BMP image.