Wade,

Sorry for the late reply. Anyway, I'll try to explain something about
PNG images and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

This browser has problems with transparency in PNG images with a full
color palette (RGB). If you would remove the alpha channel from the
PNG images then IE should display the image as normal. However, then
you also removed the transparency from the image and some images just
need this.

If the transparent image should display on a background with only one
color then you can also paint this color on the background of the PNG
images. However, then you still lost the transparency in the image.

With "PNG-8" a PNG image with a maximum of 256 colors (= 8 bits) is
meant. You get this by reducing the amount of colors in an image. To
do so you open an image and go to the menu Image > Mode > Indexed...
From there you can choose to generate an optimum color palette with a
maximum of 256 colors.

Doing so will also create a smaller final image size (which is nice).
When I use images on the web in general I try to reduce the numbers of
colors used in the image using this function. For most images the
result is fine.

However, you should check the result of reducing the number of colors
in your image. You can make a duplicate of your image using the menu
Image > Duplicate (CTRL+D). Then you can compare your image before and
after reducing the number of colors.

Instead of fixing your images you could of course also fix this
IE-browser (or at least make it behave like a more standards compliant
browser):
- www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
- http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/pnghowto.htm
- http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/

Kind regards,

Martijn
http://gimp.startpagina.nl