Visual Style Alternatives

Before visual styles were a part of Windows, only one way existed to change the way Windows looked. That was accomplished by using a program called WindowBlinds, which is made by Stardock (www.windowblinds.net). WindowsBlinds is a classic Windows program. Back when it first came out, it transformed the boring gray interface of Windows into an attractive and colorful experience. Now that Windows XP includes its own skinning engine, products like WindowBlinds, which have their own skinning engine, become less necessary. So why am I even mentioning this application? Because there are some things that it brings to the table that visual styles do not. Because WindowBlinds is a completely independent skinning engine from the Microsoft visual style engine, it has some features that the native engine does not have. One of these features is the ability to skin parts of the operating system that the native skinning engine cannot. The most talked about application that has this problem is the Command prompt in Windows. For some reason, Microsoft’s engine just does not apply visual styles to this window. Instead, it is displayed using the classic Windows interface. WindowBlinds will allow you to skin this app as well. WindowBlinds has a very strong skin base. A lot of very talented people have created XP skins for WindowBlinds that just look great. One benefit of using WindowBlinds to change the way your computer looks is the set of additional features that it provides, one of which is the ability to “roll up” a window so that just its title bar is shown. This is a great feature that can be activate by just double-clicking the title bar on skins that support the feature. Another benefit of using WindowBlinds is its ability to skin applications that were not made to be skinned. This is a nice feature, but can also result in some applications looking a little strange because their buttons and other visual elements are replaced, which often throws off the spacing and placement of controls. The one controversial topic about WindowBlinds is its effect on system performance. Because it runs on top of your computer’s visual system and uses special system calls to change the way the computer looks, it takes up more system resources compared to the native visual style engine. Some users have a fast experience with WindowBlinds, although others do not. It really depends on your computer’s hardware. My personal experience with WindowBlinds has not indicated that they have set any record- setting speeds. I have run WindowBlinds on my computer a lot and have only noticed a decrease of performance in certain situations when I have used it with slower hardware. But my experience does not mean that you too will notice a slowdown. The speed of its operation seems to depend a lot on the specific hardware configuration of your computer, such as your video card and CPU. Also, even if you do notice a slowdown, it might be worth it if you find a really cool skin for WindowBlinds. Either way, I suggest that you give WindowBlinds a shot.

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Tweaking the visual styles

Now that you have finished changing the visual styles using one of the two methods that I
described, you can customize the look of your computer a little more by tweaking the visual
style. One thing that I always like to customize after I change the visual style is the title bar
height. You can easily do so by changing the window metrics:
1. Right-click the desktop and select Properties.
2. Then, click the Advanced button on the Appearance tab.
3. Click either the active or inactive title bar of the preview image and then adjust the Size
setting next to the Item drop-down box.
4. While you are changing the size, you might want to also customize the fonts. You can do
so by clicking the text for which you want to change the font, and then selecting the font.
5. Click OK to save your changes.
6. Click OK once more to close Display Properties and activate the new changes.

Customizing the way a visual style looks is always refreshing. Usually when you install any sys-
tem, you find a few things that you wish were just a little different. Now you know how to
refine your desktop to look its best.

Making your own visual styles
You now know how to install and use custom-made visual styles, but did you ever wonder how
other people make visual styles? This next section will take you through the process of creating
your own visual style as well as the history of how people started making them.
It all began before people could actually use the visual styles. Curious users snooping around
their Windows XP files discovered that Windows XP had a skinning engine just like many
other applications that had the whole look of the operating stores in a file on the hard drive in
the themes folder called luna.msstyles. This file contains all of the data for the new
Windows XP look.
Then, just as with the boot and logon screens, people started to use resource hacking tools such
as Resource Hacker to open up luna.msstyles and replace the bitmaps stored within the
file with image files they made. Additionally, you could use programs like Resource Hacker to
edit the settings files stored within the visual style as well to edit all of the sizes of the different
Windows components.
The possibilities that applications such as Resource Hacker gave users were unlimited, except
for the fact that there still was no way to test and use the new user-made visual styles because
they were not digitally signed by Microsoft. Eventually, that all changed, as you know from the
last few sections, and users were able to use their own visual styles.
Now there are several different ways that you can make your own visual style. You can use the
Resource Hacker approach and manually open up your luna.msstyles file and replace
bitmaps in the file with ones you made yourself. This process can be a very long and difficult
one when you are trying to design a completely different visual style. This method would really
only make sense to use if you just wanted to replace one part of a visual style, such as the green Start button.

If for some reason you just don’t like the green Start button, then you can open up the file in
Resource Hacker and look for the bitmap on which to work. First, you will probably want to
extract the bitmap from the file so that you can work on it in your favorite image editing
program. Then, once you are finished, just replace the bitmap in the file with your modified
version. Hit Save As, give the file a new name, and you are finished once you create a new
folder for the name of the visual style.
If you want to make a completely new visual style with a new look or modify an existing one
beyond changing one little component, then using a commercial editor is a must. TGT Soft,
the company that brought you Style XP and the first patch for the visual style engine, has come
out with an editor known as StyleBuilder.
StyleBuilder is an amazing program that TGT Soft created after they found out how the visual
style file was compiled. It provides the user with an easy-to-use visual front for editing the
visual style files. Instead of using a resource hacker and searching for a specific bitmap to
replace, you can just navigate through the menus and click the object that you want to replace
within the editor. This saves a lot of time and makes it feasible to create a whole visual style
from scratch.
To get started, download a copy of StyleBuilder from TGT Soft’s Web site, located at
www.tgtsoft.com/download.php. Sometimes, the best way to learn something is to start
by modifying a visual style. Once you download and install a copy of StyleBuilder, perform the
following steps to learn how to import an existing visual style, make changes to it, and then
save it for use on your computer and distribution on the Internet:

1. Start up StyleBuilder by navigating though the TGT Soft folder in the Start Menu and
selecting StyleBuilder.
2. Say that you’d like to import the iBar 4 visual style that you use on your computer and
want to make some changes to it. When StyleBuilder is starting up, click the File
Menubar item and select the Import .msstyle file.
3. Next, you will have to fill in the two boxes on the import window. Specify the .msstyles
file of the visual style that you want to import to modify. Then specify the folder that you
want all of the settings and images to be extracted to so that StyleBuilder can edit the
files.
4. When you are finished filling in the two boxes, hit the OK button to start the import
process.
5. After a few seconds, the import should be done and you will be notified if the import has
been successful or not. If it has, you will have the option to open up the newly created
StyleBuilder files to edit the visual style. Click the Yes button so that you can edit the
files.
6. StyleBuilder will now open up the imported visual style for editing. First, get familiar
with the interface. Figure 4-10 is what the StyleBuilder interface looks like when you

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Installing new visual styles

Currently, you can use new visual styles on XP in two different ways. Both options work
around the requirement that visual style files must be signed. First, I am going to explain
how to use, as well as the benefits of using, TGT Soft’s Style XP to use new visual styles.
Then, I am going to show you how to use patcher XP as well as the benefits of using it. But
first, I am going to show you where to download visual styles that can be used on your
computer.

Downloading visual styles
Many cool sites on the Web offer thousands of visual styles to download. Unlike boot and logon screens, you do not need to worry about the version of a visual style because they are not system-critical files and their format does not change when service packs are released. This capability makes downloading them even easier, because you don’t have to worry about screw- ing up your computer.

Check out the following list of my favorite sites from which to download visual styles. I think you will find them very helpful. ThemeXP.org (www.themexp.org) offers well over 1,100 visual styles for Windows XP. It is, by far, the leader in the XP visual style world. XPTheme (www.xptheme.info) offers over 300 visual styles. NeoWin (www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum 36) offers a great theme forum that has a lot of quality visual styles. deviantART (browse.deviantart.com/skins/windows/visualstyle/) is another good site for visual styles that has an easy to use navigation system that shows 24 thumbnails of visual styles at once. TSS2000 (www.tss2000.nl) is a great site from which to get quality visual styles. Although they require you to register on their site to download a visual style, this requirement is worth it. They also have a large collection of Apple OS X-looking visual styles.


I personally like the look of the Apple OS X visual styles but do not like trying to make my PC look like a Mac. My favorite visual style is called iBar 4 set on the WinFlag color scheme, which is shown in Figure 4-6. It is a nice blend between the OS X look and a Windows visual style. The iBar 4 visual style can be downloaded from www.deviantart.com/deviation/ 4650418/. Many more sites are available from which you can download visual styles, but the sites mentioned previously will give you plenty of styles, more than you are likely to ever go through or use. Once you have downloaded a few visual styles that you would like to use from the Web, you are ready to extract them and place them in the appropriate place on your hard drive.

Windows stores the default Windows XP-style visual style at C:\Windows\Resources\ Themes on your hard drive. This is also where you should extract all of your visual styles that you downloaded inside a folder that has the same name as the .msstyles file. If the folder is not named correctly, Windows XP may not recognize the visual style. Also, you will find that when you extract some ZIP files where there was a visual style, there may be a folder called shell. This folder contains other visual style data and should be put in the same folder as the visual style file. If you also have a .theme file included with the visual style download, you should place that in the themes folder instead of inside the visual style folder. When you have finished installing all the visual styles that you have downloaded to the themes folder, you are ready to set up your computer so that you can use the visual styles. The next two sections will show you how to install them using the two different approaches already mentioned:using the shareware Style XP and using freeware patches such as UXTheme Multi-Patcher.

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modify visual style

Windows XP includes a new skinning engine built into the operating system, which it uses to display its own skin format, known as visual styles. Visual styles are responsible for transform- ing the boring old Windows classic look into the colorful and visually pleasing Windows XP look. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided to keep the format of visual styles secret and built the skinning engine to only accept Visual styles that are digitally signed by Microsoft. This decision puts a big roadblock in the path of creating your own visual styles. On top of that, Microsoft decided that they were not going to release any more visual styles, so we are all stuck with the default Windows XP look. This presented a problem to the Windows XP tweaking community. Everyone wanted to take advantage of the new visual styles engine that was built into Windows XP and create his or her own visual styles. When I first started to use Windows XP, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create my own visual styles. I tried using Resource Hacker on the visual style file that came with Windows XP to replace the bitmaps inside the file. I was sure that this attempt would work, but when I tried to view the visual style in Display Properties, the rendering was very strange in the Preview window, and when I tried to apply it, the computer would revert to the classic Windows interface. After spending some time browsing the Web and reading forums, I found out that the reason why my new visual style was not working was because the file was not digitally signed by Microsoft. Apparently, even if you modify a file that was signed by Microsoft, the signature is broken because the checksum of the file changed when you replaced the bitmaps.

What would be the next step?
Well there were two options: either try to fake a digital signature
on the theme file or just remove the digital signature requirement from the visual style engine.
Faking a digital signature is very difficult, if not impossible, so removing the digital signature
requirement was the only plausible choice. This was the limit of my skills. I had no clue how to
remove the requirement other than opening the file up in the hex editor and starting to delete
random bytes.

Thankfully, someone else figured it out. A company called TGT Soft (www.tgtsoft.com) released a program called Style XP, as well as a free patch that you could use. All you would have to do is run the patcher on your computer and let it go loose on your uxtheme.dll file, which is the heart of the visual style engine, and it would remove the digital signature require- ment. You’ll soon learn how to use the Style XP shareware for making lots of interesting changes, in the section entitled Installing New Visual Styles. The development of Style XP and its runaround of the Windows XP signatures created shock- waves in the skinning community. It would now be possible to use different visual styles to take advantage of the new skinning engine. Sites such as ThemeXP.org sprung up, offering hun- dreds of visual styles that XP users all over the world made. Everyone was happy, except for Microsoft. Eventually, TGT Soft found itself in a little trouble when Microsoft found out that they released a program that bypassed the requirement. Microsoft could have blown this company out of the water, but they were very generous and allowed TGT Soft to continue to develop its product and helped them write a service that ran in the background so that they would no longer have to hack the system file. Nowadays things have changed a little bit. TGT Soft still offers its Style XP application that can be used to unsign visual styles, but it is still shareware. Thankfully, there is an application called the UXTheme Multi-Patcher, which will patch the skinning engine just like the old TGT Soft patch. More will be discussed about the patchers shortly, in the section entitled Using UXTheme Multi-Patcher to enable use of non-Microsoft Visual styles.


It is a little unclear what Microsoft thinks about users of Windows XP bypassing its digital signa-
ture requirement for the visual style engine, using applications such as UXTheme Multi-Patcher.
Taking a look at the whole situation, they really do not have a reason to be upset because it is
not like the Multi-Patcher is contributing to software piracy. Additionally, the ability to use thousands of visual styles available on the Web with the fast native visual style engine is a great reason to upgrade to Windows XP. From a marketing standpoint, Microsoft should just forget about the stupid protection. It would make users of Windows XP happier because they would be able to customize their computers easier.

So, you’ve now learned a brief history of how one of the best new features of Windows XP
became unlocked. These next few sections will show you how to install and use new visual
styles on your computer to completely transform the way the user interface looks.

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