Comments by Andy Bantly (Top 4 by date)

I would suggest going over to the SysInternals forum and ask those wizards how they do it...

You know, I didn't try changing from FALSE to TRUE to let it convert the image. I did try the 0 value but got the same result. It is so confounding to me. I can go through those gyrations to save the file to disk and then use my alternate solution below to load it into a IPictureDisp. The only other thing I could think to do is to somehow create a CStreamArchive from a IStream. It should be possible since IStream is CStreamArchives base class. I should probably try to look at the data for both cases in memory and see if there is anything obviously different about the streams. e.g. one is store unicode and the other as raw byte data.

Yes, you should write your application as a service instead. The UI has to be separated from the work. You would then have two applications. A service and a UI component. One strategy for communicating from UI to service is by using named pipes. This is pretty straight forward. I already posted an article on creating a service. I should do an article on making UI that controls and communicates with a service.