Take a look at the same picture converted to a 256 color BMP by IrfanView (a freeware program from www.irfanview.com). It does a much better job than Paint. However, you may simply have a system that stores display information separately for each monitor resolution. Try manually setting your monitor to your target resolution (e.g., 800x600, 1024x768, etc.) and see if that target res is set to run at 256 colours. If so, bump it up to 24 or 32 bit (i.e., millions of colors). Then try running the session from that or any other resolution and see if it helps. You might also be running the session at a higher resolution on your machine that can't handle millions of colours. If that's a possibility, try running the session at a lower res like 1024x768.