For those not having the heart to try it out:
This is an almost plug&play mod. I've high-jacked the "Don't use XP-theming..." to enable or disable it at runtime without restart (but some leaks may still be present so don't abuse it). This pnp thing took more than the actual design
but the gain in usability was worth the trouble. So you will be switching it on or off from the
Tweaks Page. Note that off is not 100% the same as the non-mod, because I have removed some borders. Two overall colours can also be selected in Tweaks, face and outline. The custom toolbar.bmp resource uses (0,0,0) for button face and (128,128,128) for button outline - those two will be replaced with your own. The seek bar will use them in the same matter, but the volume control will use them as left/right (could be undesirable sometimes, but it is fine as default).
Next (main) feature is the seamless gradient background between the toolbar and the seekbar. The toolbar also uses custom glass-like highlight. I would say it's better than default W7 because it aligns the mask to the center of the buttons and it better highlights selected buttons. Also it tries to blend in the separators. Disabled buttons are painted only on the outline. The volume control is redesigned. Ditched the thumb. Has different looks for mute/play and uses the custom colours for selected/not selected areas. Ditched the thumb from the seek bar, too. Useless when you can click anywhere on the channel. An added (or removed in some pov's) functionality, is that it will update media to position only after mouse drag ends. The default behaviour killed my speakers most of the times when used with a touch-pad. And feels choppy with mouse anyway.
Some cosmetic changes applied to the status and info bars. Blend in with the toolbar by removing the 3dframe. Will hide most of the white flicker on the right+down sides when window is resized from the left. The playlist has only the background and default text color updated and the borders around reduced. Did not want to mess with sizecbar component. Changed noaudio/mono/stereo images also. Pleasant sound waves should never be drawn as straight lines, better of without them
As
Ger pointed out, this mod can be used with your custom toolbar buttons, it will not update those.
And this concludes my mod. Please keep mod-related bugs out of main thread, use this one instead.
About performance now: I've cared about looks first, and less code added second. Many things could be improved, but don't expect wonders.
tetsuo55, nothing can beat performance-wise the 3(three) GDI lines that create the default volume control. Not even dots, as those are even more taxing
Something may be squished from the gradient fill, uses default function that should be hwacc (but not for the seekbar - uses an offscreen dc because I had some bad experience with flickering on W7 basic theme).
I use this one on my ageing crt, helps reduce screen afterglow and does not burn my eyes on popup
Presenting the very first easter egg: pure pink color (RGB 255,0,255) is used as a mask color and will be painted transparent.