After some playing around and examining and that, I've come across two major clunkers with the current format regarding theme configurations...

1) It doesn't appear to recognise the "Hand" handle at all in the Cursors section, so any custom cursor you choose for the Link Select function gets ignored anyway. This conflicts with Control Panel's Mouse settings saving such a key in your registry like with all the other cursor regkeys.

2) I saved a custom theme config which specifically stated "No Sounds" in the sounds section. As such all its sound settings are blank. And yet when I loaded this config through XP later on, it restored the original XP sounds regardless, against my wishes.

As such I cannot really take the themes part seriously anymore, and will simply resort to building my own settings from scratch - choosing the Visual Style, the sounds, the cursor pack - and ignore the theme listing part altogether.

A sorry, sorry state of affairs. And with Vista coming very soon I doubt MS will bother to fix this in the end.

Sound themes don't go in a .theme file.

(or do they...)