One of the great things about using native widgets, such as with SWT, is that the widgets can display with the current operating/windowing system theme. However, by default applications use the legacy Windows look and feel. For such applications use of themes requires an application manifest to be provided (details here).

In the Eclipse world this typically means adding a manifest to javaw.exe. Unfortunately Sun has chosen for native applications to use the legacy Windows look and feel, by not including the manifest with it. In order to use the current theme the SWT team have tried to make things easier, but doing so requires you to do the following (for Windows XP and later): (more…)