ok, the office2003 setting seems to only change the shape and structure of controls, so can anyone tell me is there some way to change the colors to the blue scheme office 2003 uses?

any help is appreciated

Doug

When you set the Visual Theme property to Office2003 the control should automatically display in whatever theme XP is currently using. If you arent developing on an xp machine then I dont know what would happen.
I just did a test. I currently have blue theme on but I changed to Olive Theme and then ran my program and it displayed the menu in Olive Theme. So you dont need to make any changes to make it display in blue, it should detect it and then display in the appropriate theme colour.

Or if you mean how do you set the colour of other controls to be the same blue then I use this formMain.BackColor = formMain.CommandBars.GetSpecialColor(XPCOLOR_SPLITTER_FACE)

If you're running the Office2003 theme on a non-XP machine, you won't get the XP visual themes (which is what the Blue and Olive schemes are).  If you install Office2003 on a non-XP machine, you'll see that CommandBars accurately mimics the look-and-feel of Office2003 as it is displayed on non-XP machines.

I seem to remember this question coming up in the past, so search the forums.  I believe a user posted a suggestion for how to come close to duplicating the Blue theme on a non-XP machine using the Office2003 theme.  That post might help answer your question.

This is the previous user post I was referring to.  Turns out this solution was not for the ActiveX version of the control, so you won't be able to use it (ActiveX doesn't support custom themes).  Here's the post anyway:

https://forum.codejock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=403&KW=office2003 - https://forum.codejock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=403&K W=office2003

Perhaps try this:

CommandBars.Options.LunaColors = True