It is better to stay with the Microsoft styles because the user will
feel "at home".
There are lots of ways to make your application outstanding (for example
balloon tooltips if necessary).
When I was a beginner, I felt that I had to change the world and even
bought custom controls.
That was a wrong decision. Why? Because my app was almost done and it
was still crashing.
"No problem", I thought, "this will surely be a quick fix". It was not.
From this I have learnt that creating custom looks is really difficult.
I use subclassing a lot but not for design, and only when really
necessary. You should take a look at vbAccelerator.com. While most of
the code is cool at first, you will learn sooner or later that only 5%
can be used for commercial purposes because your users will suffer from
crashes now and then.
Also, staying with the Microsoft style is very good, because if you
develop your app e. g. in XP, then you run it on Vista, and you will
notice that your app will use the new Vista styles. Not good?
There is one more thing that you should keep in mind:
Everytime you create something custom, you should make sure that it
looks nice in each Windows color scheme, and that is hardly possible.
Sorry to bomb you so much, but it's really better to put your energy in
the app itself.
Zaph.
