Is there any way to get this looking like it does on the right? On the left is the VWM in a xlabel, on the right is a dummy label of the same size, with its background set to the same image, both with borders of 0 all around and stretching.
http://www.doddstech.com/vwm.png

Making the actual background of the VWM transparent would be the perfect solution, but so far that hasn't worked. When a magic pink BG is used, any desktop selected simply fails to go back--it keeps the selected color, rather than the BG being drawn.

Also note: a properly sized image is not an option, as it would take 1536 images per theme color selection.

how big is the actual graphic? as shown? tried resizing it to its maximum size which it will ever be shown (so that the stretching would actually be compressing?).
this probably doesn't matter, but i'm just throwing guesses around.

I've got my VWM background transparent but it took some experimenting (and I'm not sure that this would work docked into an xLabel or not). I've got a 1-pixel magic pink image tiled as VWMBackBMP, and VWMUseFakeTrans is set. If I turn off the fake transparency it just shows a pink background, and I don't recall why I don't have it draw the background with VWMBackColor, but it works so I'm satisfied.

I guess RabidCow would be the one to give you a definitive answer on this one.

On Win2k/XP you can use a png with the alpha channel set to 1 and VWMTransparent to make the background transparent. Making it 100% transparent with alpha or magic pink would prevent you from clicking on the VWM.

I've been assuming that the funky stretching was just a necessary ugliness from StretchBlt, I'll have to see how xlabel deals with that.

The actual image is 294x294 (for this case, it could have been 294x1, and the final probably will be).