I never got that background texture thing with 98se, it just never worked for me. Then I was designing myself a more colourful desktop and stumbled on it - yeah, you need the windows Appearance colour to contrast with the Background colour.

Loving the Stone effect.

Yeah, I know. I'm pathetic....

To "spice" up your Desktop background:
- d/l this small 82 bytes bitmap [right-click to save]:
http://www.mdgx.com/files/MINI.BMP
- right-click on empty Desktop spot
- click Properties
- click Background tab
- click Browse button to select MINI.BMP
- select Stretch under "Display:"
- make sure your Desktop res is 16 mil colors [32-bit = true color]
- done.

FYI:
u can make your own BMPs with different patterns [try for example different colors in 18x2 , 27x3 , 8x8 pixels, etc... the sky's the limit].
Please note that I have used only basic colors here, but u can use any color combos + factors: gamma, hue, saturation, luminance etc.
If using MS Paint, switch 1st to 32-bit desktop res before u run mspaint. That way u can create a new BMP of same res as your screen res from scratch, without changing the BMP res from within MS Paint.
Because MINI.BMP is only 9x1 pixels in size, it doesn't matter that it is 32-bit [true color = 16 mil colors], it takes very little Windows memory to display.

Have fun.

That's great, MDGx. Thanks very much.