Not that I am going to pursue this with any degree of priority or urgency, however, as I had a fresh build to do of TC3.3 I was able to get a little more information.
Before any gtk2 elements had been added to the fresh build, the block like menus in Opera were present. Adding xfce4-notifyd.tcz, and thereby gtk2 as a dependency, presented the more 'polished' appearance. A copy of gtkrc-2.0 had not been generated at this point, or after a reboot.