AHA! I found an article that says this only works on files up to 32 X 32 pixels. When I used that size, I got transparency correct. The icon image, however, is not very clear. I may need to look at opening the 48 X 48 size file and converting it down to 32 X 32 to save ...
Ascii characters have the MSB bytes of the character equal to zero. If we had a string with the greek letter omega 0x03A9 followed by your character 0xC9 the string would look like this : 0x03A900C9 (two character) . The converted byte array will look the same. When you read the ...
Had you really been converting using Windows-1251, that character would change to a ? mark because it is not in Windows-1251. If you really want Windows-1251, you would need to use System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("Windows-1251") instead of Encoding.Default....