The new control center shell (from Novell’s SLAB) is now on for GNOME 2.17.
As you can see in the dialog, it looks a bit ugly, not only because of the missing icons (my setup’s fault), but because there is only one category (“Preferences”). So, next step, categorize the capplets.
BTW, I couldn’t get CVSROOT/modules from GNOME CVS, so until I fix it, you’ll have to download by hand slab/libslab and put that libslab directory into gnome-control-center source tree.