AlYum

6000.16386.061101-2205 ? if it makes any sense ... And from those screenshots, it looks like it still has that empty bootscreen with a lonely green progress bar...

Ppl say they're not real folders, some sort of junctions. They're not accessible even from other OS on the same computer or begin to endlessly show themselves inside themselves.

What kind of a bootscreen do you have now - the original black with MS flag ? I remember that when i used modified ntoskrnl.exe, if the background of bootscreen was colored, then the screen between boot logo and welcome screen had also the same color. I re-read the first post, so i assume this is not the case. You probably know there's a way to insert a picture to appear between the bootscreen and the logonui welcome screen. May be your blue splash has something to do with this ?

BootSkin doesn't modify ntoskrnl, it creates file called vidstub.sys in SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ folder and writes some stuff in SYSTEM branch of registry, which forces this driver to start before ntoskrnl, believe it or not, and kinda substitute kernel's resources and code for loading boot screen picture and progress bar. But this vidstub.sys still uses bootvid.dll as VGA boot driver, just like ntoskrnl, so there can be still only 16 colors in boot screen. I read that BootSkin developers promised to include support for 256 colors in next versions, but there're no such yet. I think someone has to modify code in bootvid.dll somehow, besides ntoskrnl, if they want to use 256 col (8bit) bmp as a boot screen.