Great stuff kevin, many thanks. I guess i had the wrong idea about
what filestreams were there. I couldn't work out why it asked for a
file location string!

There are a couple of issues with using the code to load the png to a
picturebox via this method :

picturebox.image = image.fromfile(filenamestring)

When i use this, i get a permission issue when clicking another file
to load in my thumbnail utility. it says that the temp PNG is being
used by another process. I havent worked out why yet, or a way to free
the resources, but the plus side is that is if use :

picturebox.imagelocation = filenamestring

I can avoid this error. i'd like to find out what image.fromfile is
doing differently, but the other way does work perfectly well.

As for the transparent issue with TGAs, i dont know why they don't
display the transparent areas. It's an old format i guess but im
assuming that PNGs still store the transparency in the extra 8 bit
channel? photoshop collapses the image even if you make it on with a
transparent background, and fills it when you save with the foreground
color.

The reason for not using render_transparent is rendering to the dc
prevents me using the size methods of the picturebox, and i am viewing
many different sizes of images. i know render normal can scale the
image, but that doesn't do transparency!

All in all it's been an interesting quandry. hope you dont mind the
questions, and thanks again for your expert tech support!