Perry, when an application puts an image on the Windows clipboard then it has to conform to a clipboard standard format (basically it has to be a DIB, the memory resident equivalent of a BMP). It doesn't matter what the source file format is. E.g. if it's a JPEG then the reading app decodes it and creates a DIB in memory to hold the decompressed image. If you ask the viewing app to copy the image to a clipboard then it copies that memory DIB and puts the copy on the clipboard - etc.
What I did
exactly (remember to check clipboard is set to bidirectional) was go to "
www.bing.com" and save the fancy background image to a JPEG on the desktop inside my XP guest. I double clicked this so it opened in Windows Image Viewer -- hence this procedure supports any file format which Windows Image Viewer supports (I know it supports BMP, JPEG and PNG since I use those on a daily basis). I clicked the icon that transfers the resident image to the "Paint" app. I then chose
Edit | Select all, then
Edit | Copy - all inside the guest. I then ran a paint program I have on my XP host (an old copy of PaintShopPro v8), and selected
Edit|Paste as new image there. Bing's background image appeared in a window in PaintShopPro
