I cant understand why you are going towards complicity. Just use SkinCrafter or some other Skining library like DSkin which has Vista, Windows MPlayer skins and lots more. you just need to use their .dll and .cpp and .h in your project and a few lines of coding.

I dont think its possile as I did a try to convert a .cbproj to .vcproj. ie: from rad studio to visual studio. but the project used some vcl.h which is unavailable in visual studio. so making gui is totally depended on ide. you can adopt any code from bc++ proj and manipulate in your vcproj but not gui part.

Rather than using 3rd party gui library its hard to say its possible. If you can use some library like SkinCrafter then you can easily get what you want.