Alpha PNGs as Windows Desktop Wallpaper

Is there a way to load a PNG as the desktop wallpaper inside windows, and have it use the desktop background color as the background color of the PNG? This isn't so much for myself, but I've made some wallpapers that do this, and work great on linux (well, KDE and GNOME for sure, don't see why the other window managers would be all that different though), but haven't heard a success story on windows. I figured a wallpaper manager may be able to do it, but my googles of one that would turned up nothing.

Now I am mostly assuming that OSX will handle this fine, I seem to remember being able to do it when I sat down at a computer at some lab, but I'm not absolutly sure. And I only have a crappy win98se machine that is on windows, so since I figure you would need 2000 or XP, that won't work.

So yea, someone know of a way to do this so I'll have it on hand for when I next do a wallpaper?

You might be able to do it with ActiveDesktop.

But in general, Windows' wallpapering ability sucks total shit:
- Only takes BMP
- Doesn't allow an alpha channel
- Can't do gradients
- And most importantly, has the worst resizing algorithm of any desktop. Linear interpolation by the looks of it.

I figured ActiveDesktop would be the way it needed to be done, via some special webpage loaded into it, or some wallpaper manager. XP and 2000 do allow other image formats though, but it is all parsed through ActiveDesktop anyway, but still craps out on the alpha channel. I will definetly agree though, the ability of Windows to do wallpapers really does suck. Perhaps in vista, Windows will actually catch up a bit, but that won't make me switch.

Through ActiveDesktop you can probably do transparency using the PNG transparency tricks for MSIE. However, ActiveDesktop is gay bloat.

Can you tell me why on Earth do you want transparency in the bottommost layer of your desktop? Is it just so you can fap to the amazing use of PNG transparency? Admittedly, you can render your image ready to be used as wallpaper, blending with whatever color you like and resized to whatever size you like using whatever advanced algorithm you like.

<Troll>This is not like Linux, where image editors are so shitty you don't ever want to deal with them.</Troll>

The purpose would be that you could use the same image as a background for multiple themese that use different colors. So the image would look good when the theme is black, green, blue, fuchsia, or orange. Because while the background is the bottommost layer, the background color is behind the background image.

<Feedingthetroll>Said image was made in Inkscape, on Linux, and I really don't mind doing image work in GIMP, and they both can be quite powerful, if you know how to use them (much like any application)</Feedingthetroll>

Windows accepts GIF, and ironically, GIF accepts transparency.

trouble i've had in xp with both png and gif is that the text under the icons has a block around it when set to be transparent