[geekerati]

Well, I agree with you that free is best. But for a nominal fee it's worth it to me. Please read:
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Excellent application compatibility. Because Stardock has had years to tune WindowBlinds for compatibility, WindowBlinds has excellent compatibility. How good? Ask Microsoft, Nintendo, nVidia, ATI, and many others who have licensed WindowBlinds to release additional visual styles.
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Top Notch Performance. WindowBlinds uses the graphics acceleration features of today's video cards to accelerate visual styles.
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Tight Integration. WindowBlinds 5 doesn't need to any dedicated process in order to run, it runs as a native Windows XP extension.
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Native. WindowBlinds DOES NOT "skin over" the existing user interface. It works by extending the existing painting calls with newer, faster, more feature rich ones.

WindowBlinds skins virtually every aspect of the Windows GUI that one can imagine. And in fact, the enhanced visual styles used by WindowBlinds can skin things previously not thought to be skinnable such as logon/logoff dialogs, the "please wait" dialog, backgrounds in the Control Panel and other special folders, and more.

WindowBlinds 5 skins support per-pixel alpha blending on nearly all controls including the title bars, borders, menus, and other major elements. That means no "jaggies", semi-transparent elements, and just plain cooler looking user interfaces. And best of all, it does this using DirectX acceleration so for most users, it actually increases performance over standard Windows.

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