Semi-transparent

SnowScape is a PhotoShop plug-in for creating piles of snow, dirt, sand, gooey, slimy stuff, blood and similar effects to your (semi-)transparent images.

TransWin is a tiny yet powerful tool to help you to set any or all of the windows on your desktop to be transparent. You can set any window to be transparent, even can set the Start Menu and the task bar to be transparent.

AniSprite is an advanced high-performance sprite animation library for Microsoft Windows. Selected features are semi-transparent masks, alpha-channel mixing and automatic hit testing (collision detection). Full source code is available.

Be the boss at your own desktop and work with nice ambient background which you really like! Let wallpaper through and make desktop area as beautiful as never before! Apply any transparency level via hotkey, context menu or title button to anywhere.

Complete editing program for creating or modifying photos, images, simple animations, filmstrips and picture albums. FEATURES: Custom brushes; Smudge and Scatter; Effects Filters; Scanner and camera support; Crop, Enlarge or Resample; more. Freeware.

Chameleon Icon converts images of any format into Windows icons with just a few clicks. Convert any picture or photo in BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PSD, TGA and TIFF format into icons for your Windows desktop, applications, folders, email and ICQ contacts.

Puts picture with frame on your desktop. Frame can be semi-transparent or mouse insensitive. You can put virtually unlimited number of frames. Frame you put will determine the shape of the window where the picture is put.

Image to Icon Converter allows you to convert all Windows BMP, DIB, GIF, JPG, JPE, JPEG, TIF, TIFF, CPT, WMF, EMF, PNG, PCX, JP2, JPC, J2K, TGA, RAS image formats into Windows XP icons and Icon Library. Completely support XP Alpha Channel icons.

Icon Converter Plus allows you to convert Windows BMP, DIB, RLE, GIF, JPG, JPE, JPEG, TIF, TIFF, CPT, WMF, EMF, PNG, PCX, JP2, JPC, J2K, TGA, RAS, ICO, CUR, ANI image formats into Windows icons. Make capture from your screen and convert to icon.

Quick Shell adds options to the system menu of all windows to make them always on top, transparent or collapse them to the title bar. Also, menus can be made transparent. For Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.