This post has nothing to do with development, but everything to do with how one can change the look and feel of their XP desktop skin. I grew tired of the three desktop appearance's color schemes in Windows XP. Blue, Olive, and Silver were fine, but why not allow users to skin their desktop like Linux? There are at least two ways to accomplish this desire, one is to purchase a software application such as Stardock's WindowBlinds, or overwrite the uxtheme.dll found in your Windows\System32 directory. WindowBlinds is great. It works well for what it is. Overwriting the uxtheme.dll allows the use of non-Microsoft themes, which is essentially what WindowBlinds is doing. Your environment should be customizable, so I went with the uxtheme.dll option.

That's great, but why would I want to do this? Well, if you're still reading, take a look at some visual styles your XP desktop can have at DeviantArt.com. None of this is necessary, I just found it interesting, and something to help break the monotony of XP's themes. Since I use Microsoft's Virtual PC quite often, I find it helpful to have a virtual environment with a completely different skin than my host.

How to use the uxtheme.dll option:
This will require a program like PatchXP or the Neowin UXTheme Multi-Patcher. The version of the Mulit-Patcher will depend on your build version of Windows XP. Basically, we need to replace the current uxtheme.dll in our Windows\System32 directory with a patched one. The aforementioned tools will contain the new uxtheme.dll. If you want, you can reboot XP using the recovery console option, and simply overwrite your old uxtheme.dll. Be sure to save the original one first. I ran into trouble with the tools not working. After overwriting your uxtheme.dll, you will notice a change in date for this dll. If you run into trouble, email me, since I do not want to go into lengthy detail here.

After the dll has been replaced, we can install our own visual styles. Do a google search on "msstyles," or visit the DeviantArt site I mentioned earlier. Download a style to your hard drive, double-click it, and it should open your display properties to the "Appearance" tab. Select the new color of your style if it provides one, and apply the new style.