>There are some very nice tools out there but I haven't seen anything that is similar to what the client now has--or anything that could be adapted for that purpose. The current tool uses mainly bar charts or gantt charts and does a reasonable job of tracking personnel schedules but doesn't handle facilities.
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>The project involves scheduling several different types of appointments (preferrably color-coded by type) for a staff of about 15-20 people in any of 16 rooms. There is is never more than one person per room and conflicts involving rooms or personnel need to be flagged and/or avoided. The appointments are actually legal procedings and the personnel are attorneys. They'd like to be able to see at a glance information that would allow them to answer questions like: Who is available in the afternoon on the 12th of next month? What is scheduled for room 6 on Friday? When is Larry available for a full day hearing?
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>Have any of you done something similar?

Do any of the samples at http://www.exontrol.com/gallery.jsp appear to be a candidate for what you are trying to implement? The "rooms" could be items in the treeview on the left, with the specific appointments as the "child" items... or the assigned personnel could be the child or subchild items in fact. Or you could use a tab control above the gantt control and populate the tabs programmatically with the list of "rooms" available, then use that as a filter (although that could get ugly with a lot of rooms). Or use their "outlook" toolbar to list the rooms.

> Who is available in the afternoon on the 12th of next month?

Using datetime fields, you could add from/until textboxes or spinners to provide filter criteria to show/hide data on the gantt accordingly. (some random ideas)

This site talks about classroom scheduling controls...

http://easy-task-scheduling.qarchive.org/shareware.html