jorge, i know none of the winstep apps are very big, but have you ever though about replacing the wav files with mp3's? i ask because on average you can use a mp3 that is a 10th the size of a wav file of equal quality. two of my pet peeves with windows is that they should of with vista and 7 replaced wav files for mp3's, and replaced bmp's with jpg's or png's. doing that they could of shaved off a few hundred megs on the install.

MP3s were not supported natively by the OS when sound effects were first introduced in Winstep apps, only WAV and MID files.

Currently I don't think it's worth the trouble changing existing WAV files in sound themes into MP3s because broadband is widely available.

As for using BMP files instead of JPGs, there is a reason for that too: newer themes with alpha transparency use PNG files, a format that has alpha channel information. However, in the days before Windows 2000 and when those older themes were made, there was no alpha channel support. Transparency was either on or off (semi-transparency was NOT possible) and specifying which parts of a bitmap were transparent in an old theme was accomplished by using the magic pink color (RGB 255,0,255). Any pixel with that 'magic' color was treated as fully transparent.

Now, the problem with JPG is that it uses a lossy compression mechanism - information is lost when compressed and is not an exact copy of the original. As such, compressing an image could turn some of those magic pink pixel from 255,0,255 to 254,0,254 (or variations on that), depending on neighboring pixels and other compression related factors. So the pixel instead of being transparent would be rendered as a darker or lighter magenta color.

The BMP format, being uncompressed, does not suffer from this problem.