[color=#000000][font=Arial,]
I would like to write a win32 top-down 2d tile engine for a simple multiplayer game. I have researched various methods of loading and using PNGs in an windows application but I was wondering if anybody has any experience in this topic.[/font][color=#000000][font=Arial,]
I would like all the networking, keyboard input and window management handled using the WinAPI and for this image library to only load and display the images in a grid format - a minimalist use of such a library, does anybody have any suggestions?[/font][color=#000000][font=Arial,]
Thanks, Alex.[/font]

Free Image is free/open source, and will load a variety of formats.

Not sure how you mean "[color="#000000"]load and display" - displaying is a separate matter, which is more to do with whatever you're using for the graphics API? (And if you mean that you're not yet, you presumably can do that with the basic Win32 API, but there's plenty of better alternatives like SDL and Qt - these libraries also have their own method of loading PNGs.)

SDL_image

Go with SDL if all you ever want to know is how to make 2D games. If you want to take it further, you should probably use FreeImage and OpenGL.