ugly VLC after Stretch

Greets! I decided to upgrade from Jessie to Stretch last night. it seems to have worked though there are some oddities. now VLC has grotesquely large control buttons ("Pause", etc.); the interface in general seems to run on a different 'theme' and anyway is over-large. I have tried the "forced window style" option under "preferences" but none of the various options but they make no different in these respects. maybe 'CDE' comes closest. I have purged and re-installed VLC also to no avail. I have looked at the 'themes' VLC offers. awful. just want my orange-colored working interface back. the only other application I've found which has undergone similar changes is Pan - it has a more 'pastel' shaded control set which I don't appreciate but can ignore. note a complication: I had Devuan installed and just did the Stretch update but not sure of its relevance (thus I mention it). f. -- Felmon Davis