My desktop background is currently the standard Microsoft Flag. I changed it before, but every time I load new software the flag csmes back.
Currently I have a picture of the late great Miss Emily Kimberly, springer spaniel extraordinaire. She’s standing in long grass, and her tongue is hanging out about eight inches, so you can tell that she was having a good day. Hard to believe she’s been gone almost a year. Her successor, Miss Phyllis, keeps us busy; she has her own personality, but reminds us of Emily in so many dear little ways.
Othertimes I have a photo of Mr. Scarlett dressed as the Mad Hatter.
On the laptop, I have the plain old Windows 98 theme. I guess I like the pretty colors. But now that I have my scanner up and running again, maybe I’ll find something new for it.
I’ve got a picture of David Coulthard rounding the big banked corner at Indianapolis on my computer. At the moment, the computer I’m at (jec3207-28.rcs.rpi.edu, if you care) has the color blue as a background. I’m not quite enough of a Unix geek to know how to change it.
I have the Powerpuff Girls in Halloween costumes.
I must be from another galaxy because I do not understand why on earth people would want to put anything on their desktops. First of all it uses resources which your computer can put to better uses. (how about people who complain their computer is slow but then waste resources on things like this? duh?)
Then, it makes the icons harder to see and it ruins the picture by putting all the icons over it. I don’t get it. My desktop is the original green. I’ve tried black but returned to green… it seems more soothing…
sailor - I set my picture as “centered” with about an inch of background surrounding it. The few icons I have on the desktop are in this border. The picture itself seems to use a minimum of resources and it makes me feel good.
We also use these pictures to identify computers on our peer-to-peer network in the department. It’s easier for people to remember that the file they want is on the “Odonate” or “Stink Bug” computer than computer number 3 or 4.
Two of my all-time favorite faces… Joe Perry and Steven Tyler. Sigh.
currently I have a copy of SINFEST comic strip as my wall paper. I rotate it with SLUGGY sunday strips, pics of the family and pics of my truck under snow. the last helps me keep cool here in Saudi
a desktop picture really doesnt use very many resources. My computer has 128 mb ram. The picture is a jpg image, and so it uses about 200 KB. Even with a large BMP image, you only get about 1 MB.
What does slow computers down is having hundreds of things down on the taskbar (on windows) next to the clock. I see people who have about two inches of these little icons (virus scanners and stuff) down there and complain that their computer runs slowly
I currently have a picture of F15 fighter as it breaks the sound barrier. The condensation cloud forms a giant whit bubble at the back of the plane and a smaller one around the cockpit. I don’t remember where I got it, but the caption said the photo was taken from a aircraft carrier deck as the pilot made a low altitude, high speed fly-by for the photo op.
Currently, I have a picture of Vincent Valentine, from Final Fantasy VII (Which goes quite nicely with the ‘lilac’ colour scheme).
He’s perched, crouching, on the roof of the ‘Shinra Mansion’ overlooking Nibelheim during a thunderstorm.
Ah, hells, I can’t really do it justice with a description.
I got it from Here. It’s the bottom-right one.
Unfortunately, several over the images there aren’t working. 
Including the Sepheroth one, which is my favourite image from the game…
Anyway, the Vincent image is GORGEOUS!
I change mine frequently as I’m easily bored. All summer it was a lovely coral reef scene a friend took while scuba diving. Now it’s a vivid autumn farm scene with tons of pumpkins and a bright blue sky that I downloaded from this site
Apparently the link above links to the home page. Well I don’t know how I did that. Try http://www.webshots.com