The tab styles look even worse on Vista. I wrote a rendering dll.. that worked on an inherited tab class.
You can make cuttons look radically different by using back images and images. When hovering over the buttons, or depressinh them, that can be detected in Event handler and effects managed there. You can see the tab rendering effect at www.freewebs.com/ReneeCC
I had to make a class to do that. I could send you the code if you like.
the buttons look like that because of the images in the buttons.
I have buttons on my browser that look like that. They are smaller but they look like that.
I just remembered that all of the code you want is available here.
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=1264835&SiteID=1
The code and dlls are provided in the supplied reference. The colors etc come from images contained by the buttons.