I did find a great theme pretty quickly which does look better than the Windows Vista Basic Theme if you ask me. The only thing that I had to change was the wallpaper image which did not look that great. I would like to begin by explaining a common error that I received while trying to enable a theme other than the windows classic theme. The error was “The theme could not be loaded because the theme service is not running”. I hit Windows + R, entered services.msc and hit enter again. The theme service was not started and i set it to automatically start at Windows startup and started it as well immediately.

The problem was that the message was still there when I tried to activate another theme. I decided to try a reboot which fixed the problem. I could activate other themes without problems.

If you do not know how to activate themes do the following:

• Right-Click the desktop and select properties
• Select the Themes Tab
• All of your themes are located in the Theme pulldown menu
• To activate a theme select it and click Apply

The Zune theme for Windows XP can be downloaded from this official link.