problems opening Photoshop CS-generated bmp file in Windows CE

I have an end-user who is programming in Windows CE and cannot open certain .bmp files generated in Photoshop CS. He does not have this problem with .bmp files that were generated in previous releases of Photoshop.

Has anyone else run into this?

From what I've read (and tried to understand) this morning, Windows CE somehow magically converts from .bmp to .2bp, but I haven't found much information beyond that yet.

It appears (based on the end-user's research) that there is a particular string in the problematic .bmp files that is not present in the other .bmp files. I have a hunch that this is somehow related to the problem, but I'm not really sure what direction to take from here.

Any help/guidance you can provide will be very much appreciated!

Brandy,

I don't use windows CE but from what I see with a quick search 2bp files are 4 Tone Monochrome bitmap files. Are the files being saved with a different bit depth?

I'm not sure...

I don't actually create the files myself, but I get to support the users (who work in another office) who do.

I'm in the process of checking their settings... maybe it's something that we overlooked when they upgraded. (Unfortuantely, I didn't get upgraded and have to use NetMeeting and have them show me, rather than experimenting with this myself.)

To make matters even more interesting, I just learned that some of these may have been created in version 7, as well...

I'll double check the bit depth, though. Thanks--

I'm learning more than I ever really wanted to about this, but it appears that newer versions of Photoshop (after version 5) have a little bit more information in them than they should.

I took a look at the file itself in hex format. An 8-bit, indexed color file starts out like this:

0000000 424d 38f7 0000 0000 0000 3604 0000 2800
0000020 0000 2001 0000 d800 0000 0100 0800 0000
0000040 0000 0000 0000 120b 0000 120b 0000 0000

The "problem" files (formatted the same way) start out like this:

0000000 424d 38f7 0000 0000 0000 3604 0000 2800
0000020 0000 2001 0000 d800 0000 0100 0800 0000
0000040 0000 02f3 0000 120b 0000 120b 0000 0000

It appears that, somehow, the image size (line 3) is being set to something even though the compression is set to 0.

I think may be causing the problem for the end-user, but I'm not sure what to tell my users to do to prevent it (other than "use an earlier version of Photoshop").

Suggestions?

No idea - other than asking Microsoft to make sure CE has the same BMP parser as XP and follows their own documentation for the file format.