strange goings on with wallpaper

suites, themes, etc. does not explain what you're doing or what is changing your wallpaper.

Are you applying a wallpaper and having it change after applying a skin? What kind of skin are you applying? Many of the skinning programs change wallpapers like, NextStart, Windowblinds, DesktopX, Litestep, and Winstyles (to name the ones I'm sure of). Some of these programs allow you to choose not to change the wallpaper with a checkbox in the configuration screens.

Sometimes the wallpaper in the screenshot is only there to make the screenshot prettier but is not actually included in the skin. A lot of Windowblinds skins are like that.

Actually, it's the "automatic" process of applying a wallpaper (supplied with the theme/suite, of course)using Winstyles or WebBlinds that has me stymied. As I said before, the majority of the time, the wallpaper is not loaded automatically using my work computer. I know it's as simple as extracting the .jpg or .bmp from the theme file and manually selecting the wallpaper but that is not what I'm after. I make sure that the options I want downloaded are checked, the download takes place, the theme is changed, the dialog box says the wallpaper is being extracted and applied but alas, no new wallpaper shows up. My intial suspicion is that it might have something to do with Win2K not liking .jpg as background files but I say that in complete ignorance.

marc...
That's probably a good call....most Win OS's rely on BMPs as the wall format...

Thanks for the info Jafo. I'll keep that in mind.