I'm not clear on what you mean by a context menu strip - perhaps that's
something new in the 2.0 platform, and I haven't seen that yet - but the
usual method for doing custom painting on menu items, either main menu or
context menu items, is to set the menu item's OwnerDraw property to True,
and then provide event handlers for the MeasureItem and DrawItem methods. In
the MeasureItem event handler you tell the runtime how much space you're
going to need for the menu item, and in the DrawItem event handler you paint
your visual representation of the menu item on the Graphics object that's
supplied to the event handler. You need to do this for each menu item you're
going to display.

HTH,
Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting