Look out Luna, Royale is here!
I downloaded a leaked version of Microsoft's Royale XP theme, which was originally developed for their Media Edition 2005 beta. This all happened almost a month ago, but I'm just about that far behind on my blogs. More information here, here, and here (random Google links).
Anyway, it seems like the horrid over-use of gradients in Office 2003 is not the fault of Office 2003 after all, but of the default XP theme, Luna. After installing Royale, Office 2003 looks like this:
My task bar looks like this:
If anyone has used the latest Yahoo! Messenger, they'll be familiar with this glassy look as Yahoo! went and used the Theming API's to make their latest offering look, well, delicious.