At some point in my program the user selects a bitmap to use as the background image of a Panel object. When the user does this, the program immediately draws the panel with the background image and everything works fine. When the user clicks "Save", the following code saves the bitmap to a DataTable object. MyDataSet.MyDataTableRow myDataRow = MyDataSet.MyDataTableRow.NewMyDataTableRow(); //has a byte[] column named BackgroundImageByteArray using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) { this.Panel.BackgroundImage.Save(stream, ImageFormat.Bmp); myDataRow.BackgroundImageByteArray = stream.ToArray(); } Everything works fine, there is no out of memory exception with this stream, even though it contains all the image bytes. However, when the application launches and loads saved data, the following code throws an Out of Memory Exception: using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(myDataRow.BackGroundImageByteArray)) { this.Panel.BackgroundImage = Image.FromStream(stream); } The streams are the same length. I don't understand how one throws an out of memory exception and the other doesn't. How can I load this bitmap? P.S. I've also tried using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(myDataRow.BackgroundImageByteArray.Length)) { stream.Write(myDataRow.BackgroundImageByteArray, 0, myDataRow.BackgroundImageByteArray.Length); //throw OoM exception here. }