You can change the tab appearance to whatever you want by making the tabs owner-drawn. I do not believe its possible to change location of the tabs, however its not that difficult to roll your own tab control. Their are a couple of ways to do this, one involves views the other dialogs. Ultimately they both involve using dialog templates which IMHO is the best way to approach this.

I have a CTabbedView class in my MFC framework, I will see if I can extract this and post it later. If you need to see how this is done quicker then look at MSDN->Periodicals->1999->C++ Q&A May and April.