If you override OnCtlColor in your property page, then you can return a different background color and that seems to work with CStatic and other items.

But what if you want is a background that’s not just a simple color? You’d like to be able to draw a background (maybe an watermark-style image) as your property page background and not have CStatic and other controls draw their own background. you would have though the transparent option in the CStatic class would do this when set from the dialog editor, but it doesn’t seem to.