  The standard model production of two photons is one of the most important
backgrounds to light Higgs boson production at the LHC. In this talk we discuss
the di-photon background, with emphasis on the effects of the recently
calculated next-to-leading-order (NLO) corrections to the gluon-gluon-initiated
component. We find that the $K$-factor for this component is smaller than that
for the analogous $gg\to H$ process, and that the correction to the total
irreducible di-photon production is modest. We also investigate ways to enhance
the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the $\gamma\gamma$ channel.
