The forums aren’t Microsoft technology, nVidia uses IP.Board (if I remember correctly); in fact, I think this is what they’ve used for a long time (always?), it’s just that they only update the forum software (and skins) every two years or so.
I’m not a huge fan of the new skin, but I’m glad they updated the forum software, the old one was getting a bit out of date. One nice “Web 2.0” feature is the syntax highlighting in ‘code’ blocks…really makes it much easier to read code that people post!