Canonical-ensemble Monte Carlo simulation and an improved fundamental-measure theory are applied to calculating the structures and chemical potentials of neutral and associating spherical particles confined in rectangular or corrugated microchannels. It is found that the confinement significantly affects the distributions of neutral spheres in the microchannels, especially at high densities or near the confining surfaces. However, for associating particles, the combined effects of packing and association lead to virtually uniform density distributions. The density profiles calculated from the density functional theory agree well with simulation results for neutral hard spheres in both rectangular and corrugated microchannels except when the average packing density inside the channel is near the freezing point. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.