Sorry, haven't worked with transparences and don't have the time to find out for you. But, here is what you can do to find out for yourself. Get a winamp skin that has transparences. Rename the extension to zip and unzip it. You will see about 8~10 bitmaps. Look in each bitmap for transparencies and if you find one. use it to find out which color is used for transparencies. The simples way is to open the data section of the file and look at it as an array of integers by writing a simple VB program.
Someone else might post a simpler ready made method. But if your going to do pixel level editing on a bmp, I suggest you play around with the above Idea. After all, sooner or later you'll have to gain hands-on experience anyway.