I am about to embark on some reskinning.
I would like to begin with a faithful reproduction of the Vista default skin because it looks like I cannot manipulate the default aero/glass skin.

Does anyone have a suggestion? I know that Diamond is pretty darn good (it even blacks out the title bar of maximized windows) but closer is better in my case

FYI: I am only making modifications that will improve the user interface with a Tablet PC, hence i'd like to keep a fair amount of the MS branding. My mods will include

1. a thinner lower profile title bar for all windows with larger min max close button that will actually stick out when not maximised (like the BeOS of old but on the right side),
2. creating a keyboard flyout icon next to the search of the start menu,
3. shrinking the thickness of the taskbar and optimizing it for positioning at the top of the screen.
4. I'd also like to see if there is a way that the scroll bar in most windows can actually see the mouse as pressing on it instead of the 1 pixel of dead space at the right hand side of the screen when a window is maximised (MS Office 2007 already fixed this).
5. if given enough time, I will move vertical scroll to the left side of the screen as a separate theme or subtheme.

My overall goal is to shrink the deadspace and increase or maintain button size as well as efficiency. This is why it is important to have things like No transparency of the titlebar or taskbar when a window is maximized with a tablet, because battery life will stay higher without unnecessarily composting the desktop underneath, etc etc. Too bad the leopard skin has the nice low profile task and titlebars I am looking for but not the branding I'd like.