when highlighting over a matching brace or curly bracket, would it be possible to matching one, a different color as it does now, but possibly bold or 1pt bigger, to make it stand out a little bit more?
In VS2003 and above you can also set the background colour, to make the matching brackets more obvious. In the IDE font and colour settings change the background colours for:
IDE tools menu -> Options -> Environment -> Fonts and Colors -> Display items = VA X Brace Error IDE tools menu -> Options -> Environment -> Fonts and Colors -> Display items = VA X Brace Matching
Unfortunately we cannot make the brackets larger, since the IDE does not know we are changing the colour of the brackets, so changing the font sizes will cause problems.
Some fonts don't show a noticeable difference when braces are bold. I prefer Lucida Console because the bold braces and parens really stand out nicely.