sent along a couple of links to his blog where he's taken a much
deeper look than my "oooooooh, pretty!" reception to the new image library that is shipping with VS2005. And after taking a deeper look at these images, I've come to the same conclusion: ugh.
Like Oliver said, if you want an app that looks good (or aren't creating VS2005), then you might want to venture over to
glyFX or my favorite
Glyfz. It looks like Glyfz is even offering their alpha-blended PNG images for free when you buy the
Office 2003 style image set. That's a deal in a half. Now all I need is an excuse to throw away our UI to get my boss to buy the set...