Steps for installing Visual Styles
=====================

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
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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 [link]). You can use a utility like Multi-Patcher ([link]) 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 [link]

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: Navigate to c:\Windows\System32\ and backup the uxtheme.dll by zipping it up (just in case).

Step 2: Copy your hacked uxtheme.dll to somewhere easy to remember say to a floppy.

Step 3: 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 4: Navigate to the location of the new hacked uxtheme.dll and copy it to the C:\Windows\System32\ directory and overwrite the existing file (remember you should have backed this up just in case).

Step 5: Reboot

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



Installing Visual Styles
===============

Step 1: Download a Visual Style my personal favorite is Abyblue ([link] Hope yah don't mind ~wirah) and unzip.

Step 2: Install (copy and paste into the C:\Windows\Fonts\ 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:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\ (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 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? Well the ones that were in the file I got from [link]

Have fun, enjoy and when you create your own (using StyleBuilder found at [link] free 30 day trial), post them to DeviantArt