Well, here's my desktop, at the actual size I use everyday (1600x1024)
Anyway, I decided to use a pic of Misty from the first special ep, where she's swimming around underwater. The 640x480 original image's quality was terrible (it was a framecap from an AVI I have of the episode), not to mention that it stretched oddly when trying to apply it. So, what I did was I redrew it in good ol' Illustrator, and imported it into Photoshop. From there, I made a very quick (and pathetic, lol) background, and slapped the whole thing on the desktop.
This screenshot was not edited in any way after taking, which means that I truly have no icons on my desktop (I used TweakUI XP to remove the Recycle bin)
The slight discoloration up near the top of the image is Winamp 5 (which was finally publicly released) using a very low opacity value (I like the fade in feature)
EDIT: BTW, I didn't see any troubles at all with uploading.