I also read this (sorry for the short, scattershot posts)..

Raster Data encoding for 24bit / truecolor images<br></br>BitCount = 24 Compression = 0<br></br><br></br>Every 4bytes / 32bit holds 1 pixel. The first holds its<br></br>red, the second its green, and the third its blue<br></br>intensity. The fourth byte is reserved and should be zero.<br></br>There are no color table entries. The pixels are no color<br></br>table pointers. No zero padding necessary.

If I understood the code correctly (notice that "if" at the beginning of this line), I think you are pulling 3 bytes at a time for each pixel (r,g,b), and not skipping the 4th (reserved) byte... If so, doesn't this mean that something's got to go wrong?

The problem I am having with this is that it would seem that something would go wrong RIGHT AWAY and stay wrong!! I would think that the picture would end up being pretty strange looking. So, I must be missing something with this one, but I thought I should mention it.