Steps for installing Visual Styles

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Steps for installing Visual Styles
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Well I thought that seeing as how I had a heck of a time trying to get these going and I have had a number of people ask me I thought that I should put something down for those of you who are interested.  The installation of a Visual Style in itself is well about as simple as it can get (copy them to a directory), but the gotcha is getting your Windows XP to support there display.

Before we get into it I would just like to say that I will not take any responsibility for any grief this may cause you, you are attempting this at your own risk we are hacking a system dll so there is the possibility of disaster.  Now with that being said it is a relatively simple process and as with just about anything there are a number of methods of accomplishing the task.



Enabling Visual Style Support on Windows XP - SP1
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Lets start off with the easy methods of enabling support for Visual Styles, first off you can install styleXP (shareware NOT FREEWARE available at www.tgtsoft.com).  You can use a utility like Multi-Patcher (download.neowin.net/nw_uxtheme…) to hack your uxtheme.dll for you.

Personally I used the Multi-Patcher (I didn't get it at the above link but I can't remember where I did get it from), it worked for the first machine I 'enabled', but not for any of the other machines that I tried.  For the other machines I did it to I had to use the already hacked uxtheme.dll from the first machine that I did.  If the Multi-Patcher does not work for you, try a google search for a prehacked version of the dll (make sure that you get the service pack version that lines up with your OS).  If you don't want to do that then you can check out the following link for instructions on manually hacking your dll www.virtualplastic.net/html/wi…

So lets move on, if you have a hacked uxtheme.dll and want to know how to install it here are the instructions.

Step 1:  Open the Display Properties dialog (right click on your desktop and select Properties), navigate to the Appearance tab and select Windows XP Style, click OK.

Step 2:  Navigate to c:WindowsSystem32 and backup the uxtheme.dll by zipping it up (just in case).

Step 3:  Copy your hacked uxtheme.dll to somewhere easy to remember say to a floppy.

Step 4:  Reboot your machine with the WinXP installation CD in the drive (make sure that your BOIS has your CD as a bootable drive and that it is before your HDD).  Now this part I am a little fuzzy on, but what you are wanting to do is boot into a DOS administration mode, so if you are prompted choose as such.

Step 5:  Navigate to the location of the new hacked uxtheme.dll and copy it to the C:WindowsSystem32 directory and overwrite the existing file (remember you should have backed this up just in case).

Step 6: Reboot

You have now enabled Visual Style support proceed with 'installation' of some Visual Styles.



Enabling Visual Style Support on Windows XP - SP2
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Sorry for the large delay in getting these notes together for those of you who want to enable VisualStyles for WinXP SP2, I have been out of the loop for quite some time and I have had to use Windows 2000 at work as of late so I was just never on my XP systems.

So the above steps apply pretty much the same for SP2 with the exception of course that you have to have a different hacked uxtheme.dll.  There is again an easy method and a slightly more complicated approach.  I used the easy approach with no issues which is to download and run an automated replacement tool like NeoWin UXTheme Multi-Patcher 2.0 (download.neowin.net/nw_uxtheme…).  Now if this does not work for you or you just want to replace the uxtheme.dll manually you can search and find a few places to download a prehacked copy of the dll like (uxtheme.dll for SP2 v6.0.2900.2180 English themes.belchfire.net/uxtheme_f…).

So if you are going to manually replace your dll here are the steps (similar to above, though there are differences):

Step 1:  Open the Display Properties dialog (right click on your desktop and select Properties), navigate to the Appearance tab and select Windows XP Style, click OK.

Step 2:  Navigate to c:WindowsSystem32 and backup the uxtheme.dll by zipping it up (just in case).

Step 3:  Search your computer (make sure that you are checking system files) for files named uxtheme.dl_ and rename them to something else like backup_uxtheme.dl_

Step 4:  Search your computer (again making sure that you are searching your system files) for files named uxtheme.dll and rename them to uxtheme.old.

Step 5:  Extract / move your hacked uxtheme.dll to your windowssystem32 directory

Step 6:  A few seconds after you have done this a message box will pop up titles "Windows File Protection" with an OK button , click said button :)

Step 7:  A second "Windows File Protection" dialog will pop up prompting you for your windows cd, click the Cancel button.

Step 8:  A third "Windows File Protection" dialog will pop up telling you that you are not using the original version of this file and that it may affect Windows stability and ask you if you want to keep the unrecognized file, click the Yes button.

Step 9:  There may be a fourth "Windows File Protection" dialog if so you can ignore it.

Step 10: Reboot your machine.

You have now enabled Visual Style support proceed with 'installation' of some Visual Styles.

If you did not see any of the "Windows File Protection" dialogs you have probably missed one of the backup copies of the uxtheme.dll, find them all and rename them and try it again.



Installing Visual Styles
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Step 1:  Download a Visual Style my personal favorite is Abyblue (www.deviantart.com/view/667713… Hope yah don't mind ~wirah) and unzip.

Step 2:  Install (copy and paste into the C:WindowsFonts directory) any fonts that are required (usually packed with the style).

Step 3:  Move (copy) the directory that the msstyles file is in (or create one to move it into) to C:WINDOWSResourcesThemes (each theme should have it's own directory, to prevent the overwriting of the sometimes included ShellStyle.dll that ships with some themes).  Make sure that if the msstyles file has an accompanying Shell directory that it gets moved as well.

Step 4:  Open Display Properties (right click on your desktop and select Properties) and go to the Appearance tab and see if there are any of the newly 'installed' themes available in the drop down list.  If not then Visual Style support does not seam to be enabled, if this happens make sure that you have rebooted your machine since attempting to enable Visual Styles.  If you are still stuck with none showing up then maybe try one of the alternative Visual Style enabling steps outlined above.



So now that you have the capabilities for Visual Styles where do you get them?  Try skins.deviantart.com/windows/v…

Have fun, enjoy and when you create your own (using StyleBuilder found at www.tgtsoft.com/download.php free 30 day trial), post them to DeviantArt :)
© 2004 - 2024 cadmus
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3llis0n's avatar
Is it the same for sp3 ??