Mike Gunderloy is a Contributing Editor for ADTMag, as well as being a developer and consultant in his own right. Here are his findings about DirectSkin from Stardock:

"DirectSkin gives you a custom control (OCX) to handle the grunt work of skinning your application. You can use the control in any environment that supports COM controls (including .NET; it works fine via interop). Once you've added the control to your project, it takes 4 lines of code to initialize, and then 2 lines if you want to change skins later. Of course, you aren't forced to allow the user to change skins; you can use DirectSkin as just a way to get a custom look for your own application.

In addition to the simple code to set up a skin, there are a batch of other methods available from the OCX. You can decide whether to skin message boxes, use secondary skins for parts of the application (up to 64 simultaneous skins are supported), skin a particular control, add additional threads to hook, and more."