I've read through the thread here
http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=31684A few times, he says that he isn't going to fix the problem
I never said it was impossible. I'm just not doing it. It would take an entire evening (at least) to find all sorts of weird themes to test with and to figure out how to get uxtheme.dll to render it into a bitmap with the right alpha composition. And even then there'd still be alignment or alpha blending issues with various themes, or themes that are authored incompletely or incorrectly that cause crashes or worse. And to top it all off, not many users would benefit from all this.
No. XP will either have Luna or Classic buttons depending on your theme. These button's images are hard coded into the resources DLL. If you want the best looking themed UI, you will simply need to upgrade to Windows 7 with Aero and glass.
But, one of the latest post says he may just do built in themes
Glass dialog footers are probably going to have to go, for compatibility reasons. There are just too many cases where the text does not render correctly, and I cannot afford the time to completely render the buttons myself.
I think I'm going to have to add an option to let you select the theme. I don't want to get into the business of saying, "Oh you don't get the spiffy look because ______", where ______ is any number of reasons that are technically legitimate but that would be 1) misinterpreted to be political ("omg they're paying you to make it not work on xp lolzzz"), and 2) constantly reported to me as "a bug".
But I don't know if he is speaking of themes for the buttons/dialogs or the entire interface. I wouldn't mind if the themes were built in as long as there is one that looks the way it is now. Right now, it almost looks like an official MS application that came with 7.
And the new icons are slick, too.