we can remove transparency alltogether and blend the icons against the background colour.
Hardcoding (blending) to white colour will look ok on Windows 2000, but they will look really horrible in other systems that haves the background colour of the ListBook different. For example, in the (future) wxMac port of C::B. They will look even worse than in w2k.
So neither options are great. Icons with alpha is not easy...
Very likely, plugins will also be classified in some manner.
Plugins categories.
Moving all non-core plugins to a separate dialog is possible, and likely to be done. At the present time, this is still work in progress.
I like the centralized way as it's now (everything in one dialog), and certainly having settings categories will help to not requiere to make separate dialogs.
The smaller the target size, the harder it is to get everything right, as you have to make more and more abstractions to reduce the level of detail.
While that's correct, it isn't important when we can't even get icons with (or without for this matter) alpha right.
I think that the alpha-icon-problem-on-windows-2000 should be solved from the wxWidgets side this way: When loading a png, it should always dither the alpha channel to the background colour. That means converting icons 32->24 bits in real time (on systems that doesn't support alpha icons, that is).