No...

As far as I'm aware it's something that's been 'happening' for a while....even though GalCiv2 has taken much of the 'work-focus' of late....

Basically we had almost finished a BootSkin that allowed for high resolution/high color depth boot screens (i.e. 1280x1024 with 16.8 million colors).

But it never got finished.  In the last few weeks before it was ready, Microsoft hired the lead developer.  Since the whole thing was written pretty much in assembly, no one else could realistically just take it over (i.e. it wasn't feasible anyway to do that).  So it sits in perpetual beta.