This is a known issue for characters created with a palette of less than 256 colors. Issues with these characters include the transparency color showing in the background, transparent balloon text, transparent balloon border, or transparent balloon background. Note that such characters may cause your applications to crash when loaded in the Agent character picker dialog or the Microsoft Office Assistant gallery. Your customized characters must use a full palette with 256 colors. You can use the sample palette provided for Office Assistant characters as a starting point with a full 256 color palette.