<p>I'm trying to get something very subtle to work, it looks pretty awful right now. I'm trying to paint the background of a TGroupBox which I have overloaded the paint function of so that the corners are show through to their parent object.  I've got a bunch of nested group boxes that look very decent without XPThemes. </p>

<p>Is there a way to paint part of a background transparent at runtime.  I'm programming the form generator, not using Delphi design view.</p>

I'm trying to duplicate this problem with the following steps:
1 - Set theme to Windows XP default
2 - Drop a TGroupBox on an empty form (align = alNone)
3 - Drop two TGroupBoxes inside the first one, with align = alBottom and align = alClient
But visually it looks just fine for me.
Can you provide some more info on exactly how you've designed the form?  Some code pasted from the .DFM would be fine.
Here's the relevant part of my DFM:
```
```
object GroupBox1: TGroupBox
    Left = 64
    Top = 56
    Width = 481
    Height = 361
    Margins.Left = 10
    Caption = 'GroupBox1'
    ParentBackground = False
    TabOrder = 0
    object GroupBox2: TGroupBox
      Left = 2
      Top = 254
      Width = 477
      Height = 105
      Align = alBottom
      Caption = 'GroupBox2'
      TabOrder = 0
    end
    object GroupBox3: TGroupBox
      Left = 2
      Top = 15
      Width = 477
      Height = 239
      Align = alClient
      Caption = 'GroupBox3'
      TabOrder = 1
    end
  end
```
```