Microsoft put a lot of effort into making Windows Vista a visually compelling operating system. The system still has the same Windows Vista theme protections in place that make it impossible to add custom themes to Windows Vista. There is also no easy way to change elements like the boot logo or system icons in [...]

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I never quite understood the users who wanted to turn the visual appearance of their operating system into another operating system. The most popular conversions are without question available for Windows XP which can be turned into pretty much any other operating system visually, well except for Commodore C-64 maybe.
The Vista Live Shell Pack for [...]

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Users who want to change the Windows XP theme are left with two choices. They can go the official way and use the few official Windows XP themes that have been released by Microsoft or they can patch the uxtheme.dll file to be able to use user created XP themes. The first way is the [...]

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The first operating system that I setup anew on my new computer was Windows XP which was also updated with Service Pack 3. One thing that I noticed when trying to change to my favorite Thallos theme from the default Windows XP theme was that it was not possible because I forgot to patch the [...]

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The file uxtheme.dll is a digitally signed file that validates themes during boot and theme installation. It is restricted and usually means that you can only install a handful of Microsoft certified themes. If you want to add and use custom themes in Windows XP or Windows Vista you have to update the file uxtheme.dll. Once the file is patched you can install and use custom themes.

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