The portable theme engine may need to allow themes to be stored in a "Themes" subdirectory.

[DrewNaylor]

This would make it easier to load themes for applications without also having them in the host application's My.Resources thing.

[DrewNaylor]

Besides, having to load from the host application's My.Resources thing is a bit complicated to begin with. Maybe what could be done is something like this:

Public Shared Sub loadTheme(themeInput As String, Optional isFilename As Boolean = True)
    If isFilename = True Then
        userTheme.Load(GetCurrentDirectory & "\Themes\" & themeInput)
    ElseIf isFilename = False Then
        userTheme.LoadXml(themeInput)
    End If
End Sub