i don't mean to knock the number of modules you're using, and i hope it didn't come out like that. i just meant that anytime i run a theme with those kind of module numbers, i have stability and performance problems. a lot of this is due to the fact that there are very, very few modules that people will run together that are coded by the same person. as for module stability, my modules are stable. if you load them with 14 other modules, all of them might take a stability hit. it's not that the individual modules aren't stable, it's just issues with them all running at the same time.

as for the BMP compressed size vs. PNG compressed size, i've actually gotten some BMP files to compress to sizes smaller than PNG files, let alone the same size. PNG files, apparently, are already compressed, so compressing them again doesn't do very much for them. but they do take up less disk space once they're unzipped depending upon settings.