This turned out to be unnecessarily complicated - because I painted myself into a corner, sort of with the help of Visual Studio .NET 2003. When I added an image list, upon load I'd run into an exception of MissingManifestResourceException.

I thought wtf? I didn't do anything. Well, mostly nothing. I found the KB article BUG: "System.Resources.MissingManifestResourceException" error message after you change the name of a localized form class in Visual C++ .NET 2003 which was sort of helpful: I found the cause, but the remedy didn't work for SmartPhone applications... here's the lowdown: my main form had the class name RegistryEditorForm, the file name though was RegistryForm.cs (.resx is of course the same, automagically). So now the resource is compiled using the file name, and the class name is different - exception. Change the class name to be identical to the .resx file name - success.

But at least the list view looks now a lot nicer than before (note that in debug mode I display the data types instead of the value names):