I brought it back to life... hehe. My apologies, I couldn't find the post when I searched for it. Hmm... I definitely gotta give UXtheme a try.
Okay, from previous posts regarding UXtheme, I realize that you can use any theme with this. So I downloaded a few, but it changes nothing. Sometimes it just comes back to the old non-xp theme. I see some .dll files in the folder. Is that supposed to be in windows/resources/themes folder as well?
Note: My windows is installed in Korean. The start button, for example, is in korean... Could that be the problem when the VS is not being applied?