<p>I'm looking for a way to embed an image in a library (Windows-only). I don't want to go the 'traditional' way of putting it in the resources (because of special circumstances that make it not so convenient to mess around with the resource handle.</p>

<p>Ideally, there would be something like xpm files: a 'text' representation of an image that is put in a c array and that some code converts into a bitmap in memory, which can then somehow be loaded into an HIMAGE or an HICON. The images I want to embed are 32-bit bitmaps (bmp). Any ideas? I'm using MFC so an MFC library would be fine, but of course I can use a library that doesn't use MFC too. Thanks.</p>

Google for a bin2c utility (something like
http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e0025274/bin2c/bin2c.c
).  It takes a file's binary representation and spits out a C source file that includes an array of bytes initialized to that data.
Just link the file in and you have your image sitting in a chunk of memory.
Using this kind of tool is really common on embedded systems where such things as 'resources' and even files might not exist.