Thanks. I've added a unittest so I won't miss this in the future.
A new release should be coming up shortly...
I tried both RC1 and RC2 of Pygame 1.8 from http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/pygame-1.8.0rc2.win32-py2.4.exe , and they both gave me this error when trying to load a PNG file:
error: Unsupported image format
Looking forward to evaluating it more! But this error stops me cold, as all my graphics are in PNG format.
--Kamilche