Odd IE 8-bit color behaviour

An IE question on behalf of my brother.

What could cause IE to render images in 8-bit color even though the machine is set to a 32-bit color mode ?

My brother has a customer who complains that all the images on the Internet are "grainy". From the description she has given him the only explanation that he can come up with is that IE is rendering images in 8-bit color for some reason.

When he emails her an image it displays correctly in Photoshop and Paintbrush. If she drags the same image onto an IE window it becomes grainy. All of the machines at the company the customer works for appear to be similarly effected.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this ?

Mystery solved.

It turns out that the company concerned has a strange policy in place. Their users can only access the Internet (for web browsing and email) via a Windows Terminal server machine. Which explains why all the IE output was in 8-bit color.

They only use terminal server for IE and Outlook. Presumably it is some odd attempt at centralizing security.

They only use terminal server for IE and Outlook. Presumably it is some odd attempt at centralizing security.

Hmm. Interesting way of doing this. The company might want to look into a Citrix solution, as it does a better job of making the applications seem normal to the end user. A friend showed me his companies configuration off his Mac. He opened the Citrix program, and had icons for each MS Office application and several others. Opening it ran the program in a near seamless mode.

I think that might actually be what they are doing in this case. I have only had the details third hand.

Ahh, ok. I know Citrix can go higher then 8 bit color, but it might get into different licensing at that point.

We ran into a similar problem and had to change all our "photo" splash screens because clients were calling up to complain about how our app was crashing on start up. It drioe the marketing guys, who had done the original artwork, nuts.

IIRC, Citrix uses a web optimized 8-bit color palette. The sys admin can set it higher but most do not as the intent is to conserve bandwidth.

This customer was complaining that the website my brother had created for her didn't look right, which is the reason he got involved in this in the first place.