This seems to be a pretty common problem in Windows Vista, related to invalid/corrupt color profiles – if you’re experiencing this issue, you’ll see a beige color bleeding through the image from the background where a white background should be. Here’s an example (thanks to matthewrowan.spaces.live.com!):
And, what it should look like:
Luckily, there is a fix (again, via matthewrowan.spaces.live.com):
After a little searching for how to change the background color, I found other people with this symptom describing it as an off color, yellow tint, orange or yellowish tinge, beige, cream colored background which, shows through the picture itself, distorts the colours, or bleeds through pictures. In most situations the problem went away in slide show mode. This was an annoying issue, making me avoid looking at pictures whatsoever in Windows Photo Gallery. This wasn’t that much of an issue because I do not use photos or pictures often on my development machine. But before I was going to install Vista on my other computer where I view photos constantly, I needed to ensure that I would not have this issue.
The solution can be found here:
Windows Vista Photo Gallery Yellow Tint Background Problem
(via Windows Photo Gallery background color bleeding through pictures)
Williamo's Blog 
Great post, I had the same problem on my SyncMaster P2370!
same problem is found in many monitors, including my Dell. it is a problem due to some bug with Windows’ monitor driver update. With some help, I managed to avoid this annoyance and a short description about how I did it is noted at http://wp.me/puVgg-1I
Thanks for the link! Excellent writeup! =)
It’s a common problem, but it’s easy to solve. Just go to “Color Management” and change the default properties which include Samsumgxxxx profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1
I hope this helps.
Neat trick! Thank you for posting this, this problem has been getting on my nerves for quite a while!