Longhorn has a .msstyles format. It's just that it's encrypted (in XP, .msstyles were fully documented wich is why third party skinning was possible).  What I suspect will happen will be resource hacking -- people replacing images in the Aero theme.  But beyond that, I don't think you'll see much.  But in either case, the .msstyles from XP certainly won't work on Longhorn because it's a different format and it's non-trivial to convert this stuff (we've spent what? 3 years now perfecting it with SkinStudio?).  And of course, this all assumes that Microsoft is going to let a big old security hole like uxtheme.dll patching still occur.

Ah, I see what you're saying.

My personal view is that uxtheme hacking isn't that big of a deal. But I have a real problem with companies who make a profit selling people the ability. In my opinion, they prey on people's ignorance.

Unfortunately...too many people have forgotten, or are unaware of what skinning was like before Win XP came along and created this hacked-skin option.

It's probably a safe bet to assume that skinning as a whole would not really have suffered if XP had had no in-built feature.

The world would have been spared x-million Luna recolours, though....hardly a 'bad thing'....