Comment 9 for bug 118304

This didn't happen to me in a couple of Ubuntu releases, but upgrading to Maverick (stardict-gnome 3.0.1-7) introduced it here.

I just checked with "strace -f -e open -o /tmp/star.out stardict" that only the icons from /usr/share/stardict/pixmaps/ are loaded.
Viewing these icons with eog or another tool shows them transparent, but in the notification area I get that light grey background just like in the screenshot linked above. To verify that the icons don't suffer from some obscure format error, I replaced one of them (after backing it up) with a knowingly working one:

cp /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/apps/updates-notifier.png /usr/share/stardict/pixmaps/docklet_stop.png

The result is the update notifier icon on a light grey background. So the problem must be the way the icons are displayed, not the icons themself.