Why are icons in property sheets rendered with so few colors?

Question

I am creating a property sheet shell extension and want to have a little icon to set off my property tab from the standard system tabs. Unfortunately, my icon is being rend

Answer 1

The PropertySheet function initialises its tab control with a 16 color (ILC_COLOR) ImageList and copies the supplied icon for each page into it. There doesn't seem to be a way to override this and supply your own ImageList (or to specify the bit depth of the created ImageList). Presumably this is a legacy of the original Windows 95 code that never got updated as things moved on.