Quote Originally Posted by Magic Ink View Post
I'm not sure if this will be helpful but http://tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1042416&page=2 suggests that a call to InitCommonControls(Ex) is not required at all if you '... invisibly add a single control from Windows Common Controls to the first form that is to be made visible.' Could it be that the explicit call into Shell32 which you seem to require could also be avoided by trying that.
You can get away with this in some programs, and as we've seen you can even get away with only calling InitCommonControls in some programs. "Getting away with it" even varies with the OS versions, and maybe even the OS Service pack level!

So you really want to do both of these things, and do them prior to the first Form loading (Sub Main).