Yes I have gone over that a few times although this was the first time checking for alpha channels and they do in fact have alpha channels. I have been working with your template for about a month now because I am adding structs for such things as Character statistics, skills, combat tables etc... I am doing 3 things at once and I keep coming back to this trying to find the answer but I guess I just dont see the problem for whatever reason.
I had originally started in cscript but recently converted everything to c just because of the depth of information that I need to plug in.
What is strange to me is that you can pick an item from inventory and it appears as a mouse map but then it disappears again when you drop it into the inventory so that would tell me that the bmap is working correctly.