Sorry, I think your right, the forum was wrapping, making your answer appear under my question - bizzarre??

you can't undo a vote, however you can revote with the same or a different number. :) Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] I only read code that is properly indented, and rendered in a non-proportional font; hint: use PRE tags in forum messages

Okay. After playing around with a number of options without luck I decided to try a completely different approach. What I did was to create a second (temporary) bitmap with the same dimensions as the transparent target but with a white background. I then wrote on it in black. Finally I merged this into the transparent bitmap by examing each pixel in my second bitmap and setting the corresponding pixel in the target with RGB set to the target colour and the 'A' byte set to 255 - ((old R + old G + old B) / 3). Surprisingly, this worked and gives me true antialias to transparent. :-D If anyone's interested I've posted the code here [^]

Okay, I've found the root of the problem. Even though this thread is now old I figure I should post here anyway in case someone gets a similar problem and finds this thread in a Google search. (Don't you just hate googling for a problem and find loads of other people asking the same questions years before and then they stop without telling you what solution they eventually used?) The third party controls I was using were placing data in Isolated Storage. Specifically (on Vista) ... AppData /Local /IsolatedStorage /(gibberish) /(gibberish) /Url.(gibberish) /StrongName.(gibberish) /Files /SyncfusionToolsStateInfo.bin. This file had become corrupted. According to the component authors deleting this file should solve the problem (a new version is recreated). However, in my case my Windows set up had become unstable so I reinstalled the whole of Windows instead. Regardless, Isolated Storage is another place to look when you have these kinds of problems. (I hope this helps somebody, someday.)

You're welcome. FYI: setting a reference to null generates a particular IL instruction (not just a store null), which strictly speaking could be skipped as the variable isn't going to be used anymore. The special instruction basically tells the JIT compiler it should generate code that clears the reference and it should NOT optimize the instruction away! :) Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles] Avoiding unwanted divs (as in "articles needing approval") with the help of this FireFox add-in modified on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 10:09 PM

No, sorry, I am not going to create and provide code. That is not how this site works. You do the effort, show some results, then ask specific questions. So I suggest you raise the level of your knowledge where it is lacking by studying serious material (preferably a book) and/or performing some experiments. Hint: when playing with TranslateTransform and RotateTransform, make sure to make your view much larger than you consider necessary, things go out of sight pretty soon, especially if you choose the wrong polarity for some of the factors. :) Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles] Avoiding unwanted divs (as in "articles needing approval") with the help of this FireFox add-in