Yes, as Overdoze said, this seems to be more related to the Sample Test Visual Style from early Beta 2 builds. I have recently dived into the early Whistler themes, so I hope I can shed some light on it.
First of all, the 2257 screenshot. Take a closer look at the buttons, there is no known build that includes this exact style of power buttons, so this makes me believe this is not a real screenshot but a concept. The icons in the left Start menu pane also look different, thought this could be just artifacting. Also the ellipse-shaped Start button and the rest of the taskbar looks nothing like what we've seen in Luna and I said before, reminds me much more of the sample style. Compare it with 2419:
This all makes sense when you take a look at some antitrust documents from the Whistler era. The
Whistler roadmap from February 2000 mentions that a skin set was planned to be finished by the end of April:
The "pro" look was Watercolor and, believe it or not, the sample theme actually seems to be its consumer counterpart. It also is the Mallard theme that Raymond Chen
described as a decoy theme that the visual styles pretended to work on while they had been working secretly on Luna. From what we have seen in the theme files, it seems that it was around already in July 2000, which is between builds 2250 and 2257, so it's quite possible that Mallard was light blue at the time and only later changed to the colorful mess that we got with 241x builds.
There is some more detailed information in an
article that I started writing, which I hope to expand over time. You might want to check it out.
