>Is there anyone else here who thinks that all controls should take the windows defaults, or am I in a minority? I'd just like to get a sense of people's feelings on this. Is a form without extra color not "flashy" enough?

I'm in the process just now of doing a color setup for a large app. There are 3 options:
1) Use windows default
2) Use system default (recommended by agency style, but which is extremely drab and not windows standard
3) User can set some local colors (something like MS Word offers)

Info is stored in user settings file. These should cover all the bases, I hope :)