Ugly “disabled” images of TMainMenu

Question

Delphi 2010, Win32 VCL. I need to create a main menu for my application with the most standard look. TMainMenu looks nice in all Windows versions, the only bad thing is when

Answer 1

If you can provide your images as PNG you can use TPngImageList from PngComponents. It has different options to make a blended or grayscaled disabled image. The PNG format allows you to make use of alphablending.

Answer 2

There's a great post on Galfar's Lair blog which describes the problem, and has code for a workaround, overriding the TImageList DoDraw method.

Here's the pic (linked) showing the 'before' and 'after'.

I think this relates to pretty much all Delphi versions.