[Digital Jedi]

It's really just a matter of personal preference, since location has no effect on performance. You also have to consider that most folks have styles that use 90% original images, or they don't use any default imagery at all. So location of directory isn't going to matter much, other then how they prefer the files organized.

I personally keep my styles in the root directory, like eXtremepixels. I treat my styles directory as a specifically themed images directory.