PictureBox displays white background

Hi,

I need to develop a menu form which contains icons and when user clicks those icons they will be directed to respected forms. Easiest way is to use PictureBox and set PictureBox.Image property to icon images. For this, I'm using .ico format of images since PictureBox can accept that. Then i handle the click event of those PictureBoxes.

It works just fine except those PictureBoxes can't display transparent background, instead they display white background. No matter what color I chose for the BackColor property, they still produce white bground. It took me hours to think what is going wrong. I googled this problem and some say PictureBox can't display transparent bground. Kinda weird here, it is not just fail to go transparent, PictureBox can't display any other colors except white.

Some workarounds I tried but to no joy:

1) Put those PictureBoxes in a container control, like Panel and make it the Parent control for PictureBox.

pictureBox1.Parent = panel1;
pictureBox1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Transparent;