I'm trying to make the background of my LinkLabel transparent so a PictureBox will show through it. However, if I set the LinkLabel's BackColor property to Transparent the label still has a white background. Why?

Controls with a Transparent color actually render their parent's background, so you're seeing the white background of the Form, not the PictureBox. There are three easy ways to deal with this.

1. Use a Panel with its BackgroundImage property set, instead of a PictureBox, and make the panel be the parent of the LinkLabel. (PictureBoxes generally don't have children.)

2. Set the BackgroundImage of the Form to the image. This is basically the same as the previous solution, but avoids the extra Panel control.

3. In code, set the Parent of the LinkLabel to be the PictureBox. You'll need to update the LinkLabel's position to match the new origin of the parent if the PictureBox isn't at (0, 0).

Shawn Burke, Microsoft