In one of the WinFX CTP articles it is noted that only the Luna/NormalColor theme is supported. In order to work with the other WindowsXP themes, there is a workaround. I just discovered that this workaround works with different themes too.

On my laptop I have the Royale theme installed (yes, I know it’s only supposed to work on a Tablet PC but, hey… :-). So all you need to do is copy the PresentationFramework.Luna.NormalColor.FxStyles files from the <windows>/Resources/Themes/Luna directory to PresentationFramework.Royale.Royale.FxStyles in the <windows>/Resources/Themes/Royale directory and your Avalon applications will work.

If you haven’t downloaded Chris Anderson‘s XamlPad, you should. You’ll need to add his site to your trusted sites so that one-click deployment would work since he doesn’t have a certificate for this site. One-click deployment is excellent. Every time I start the application it checks for new releases and automatically downloads and installs the newest if it finds it. Cool.