Congratulations on winning the competition, hqh!

I've also got few notes...

Regarding the need to wait some time before one can access the application list: I think it should start loading it right after startup in the background, possibly indicating this is happening by some icon somewhere in the corner... It should then keep the list in memory, not load it every time I click the "Install applications" button.

About the "Theming"... I was surprised to find out fapman is written in QT, given the custom look. Why didn't you use classic buttons in the main screen? Especially that background texture really looks out of place. If you are wondering how to have button icons that would always match the theme, I was solving the same problem for my case file manager. (see the code, mostly in button.cpp) In the end I used .xpm icons. They are palette-based. In the application, I replace the white color in the icon with the button text color and the blue color with the highlight color. The obvious drawbacks are that you don't have any alpha and it doesn't work with gradients, so the icons are a bit too sharp-edged, but OTOH it always fits the theme. Its not too bad IMO, I'll see how it works out when I need some more complicated icons. Check out the screenshots in the app thread. If you find some better solution, let me know!

EDIT: Oh, and to refresh the icons in the menu after installation, I put this to the postinst file of my packages:
It seems to work... maybe you could run it after each installation? Or is this what you already tried?