For custom application skinning you would use DirectSkin which is like a single application version of WB in OCX form.
I imagine your issue you are having with WB is due to ESET AV which has an irritating ability to block things starting up without telling the user. This does not impact DirectSkin however.
https://www.stardock.com/corporatesolutions/directskin/Thanks for the tip, I will look into this solution tomorrow. It is 23:00 
But some quick questions:
- The round buttons don't seem to have transparent corners, like all other controls. Is this a bug in the sample? Or just on my PC? Or do all skins have non-round buttons? This is the top skin from the list, I selected Antares.uis
- Is there an interface for drawing custom buttons by code?
We currently have some hooks created for the way we want to show buttons.
It would be nice when we could you the exact same drawing code:
- enabled, disabled, highlighted (orange text), focussed (orange glow)
- We currently have a Day and Night mode in our monitoring application, is there an ability to use the windows colors when drawing?
So one theme, but it takes it colors from the ::GetSysColor values. Our application used to modify the SysColors to get our application in Night mode, instead of making multiple themes and switching all the applications at once.
- We also support a "Touch mode", in which the font and the dialogs are scaled. Using GDIPlus for rendering a complete button gives a slightly more fancy look, then when stretching bitmaps across the button rectangle
