I notice the same thing with dreams. They look lighter and washed out. I end up bumping the chroma up and dropping the gamma a little trying to compensate but it's still not perfect.  

I also find that when you choose a position setting for the wall that crops it, it will always be a little out of focus.

I'm running NVIDIA video cards; I wonder if ATI cards have the same results?

Anyone with a non nvidia card wanna chime in?

My laptop is nvidia but my main machine is ATI...but it's XP.

And damn that is a totally crappy ass bug. FAIL

I've got a laptop with an ATI x1400 vid card, latest drivers and Vista SP1. I can see no difference between looking at the wall in Windows Live Gallery, Photoshop CS3 or having set the wall as my desktop background.

Could be a major bug with NVIDIA drivers...

I think if you set the wallpaper to one of the first three options you don't get this, the rest give you jpeg artifacts. This also happens if you set the wallpaper from Windows Explorer or Windows Photo Gallery instead of the Appearance Control Panel.

what options Purrball? I have tried all the stretch, tile, center etc.. all the same.

I don't see it in Vista Home with Nvidia card and Vista Ultimate with ATI card. Compared with desktop, Window Photo Gallery, PaintShopPro X2 and Photoshop CS3.

Id be interested on ur Nvidia set up ALMonty to see a screenshot of the LED walls center area once I realease them.

Longshot... are your video card settings set for quality rather than performance?

Well, its set at default, changing anything just bollocks everything up..looks perfect everywhere else set at default.. except wallpapers, I'm definately leaning towards this being an nvidia problem as everyone with Nvidia cards has it, unfortunately not enough people without Nvidia cards have come forward.

i have nvidia 9800 GTX and am experiencing the same phenomenon. it IS strange, because it happened on 7800 GT but it did NOT occur on my 8800 GTS, though i had completely different versions of drivers, and even Vista (Home on both of my weaker cards and Ultimate on 9800 GTX)... i really can't figure out why.
but as a matter of fact, my XP also seems to be unable to resize images set as wallpapers correctly, and i don't know why. at first, it did its job as it should, but after a while it got screwed up. can u maybe help me? (so i don't have to manually resize every images larger than screen res to the correct size ^^)

No problem John. If you want to send it to me now I'd be happy to check it out. I'm going away for work tomorrow morning and won't be home until Friday. warrior6@snip.net

I am running Vista 64 bit on nvidia 8800gtx and downloaded your wall pack and opened the 1920 version in photo viewer and then set it as wallpaper and I must admit on my system it looks BETTER as a wall than the view in photo viewer.

I've never noticed any 'washout' or misalignment or pixelization or anything wrong for that matter on mine.

Running Vista Ultimate (SP1) with an 8800 nVidia card (latest drivers) and a 24" 1080 ultraclear.

I'll double check but pretty sure it has more to do with the drivers then the actual OS itself.

hum.. ok so I did notice a funny 'stryation' effect to the horizontal lines on the executive wallpaper.. I took a screenshot, chopped it in 1/2 with the actual wallpaper itself.

This is full sized so you'll have to enlarge it to notice, on the left is the screenshot on the right is the actual wallpaper, its divided right down the center with a red stroke. (never even noticed this before, very strange.)