Alright, so this shit caused me a headache and a half. I learned a few things by fucking around during my free time for the past few days. I figure, maybe it will save someone else a headache if i just shoot my knowledge nut all up in this chan.

Changing Visual Styles/Shells for Vista seems to be a process prone to error, failure, aggravation, or any combination of the three. as of now, plenty of online support and third party help can be found in the way of changing XP visual style, but it seems very few of the modding crowd have gotten around to making these cool VS's for Vista.

Of the few cool visual styles out there, most are downloadable through deviant art. all these developers operate under the idea that you already know how to install and initialize the damn things, so it takes some digging to figure it out. The Visual Style I chose [ http://invaderjohn.deviantart.com/art/neion-96126217 ] came packaged with replacement .dll's for 3 of my system32 files. these were modded so that vista would allow a ".theme" file to be applied, even though it was not created by microsoft. In order to replace the files, i had to take ownership of each, and then change permissions for each, so as to allow my windows user account (administrator) to fuck with them. then, i renamed them "xxxxx.old" and slapped the new guy in the same folder, bearning the same name as the old guy before the name change. Altogether, i could consider my attempts a failure, but not entirely.

I did get the theme to work, but when i restarted windows, i had like 16 dirrectory and process failures as soon as i got past the windows login screen. explorer wouldnt even start. system restore time, to say the least.

Shells arent as hard to find as VS's, but their proper application eludes me just as much. I downloaded one ("OASIS" or some shit like that), and applied it by means of .exe . This program was meant to replace windows explorer, but i never could get the shell to run properly with exlorer fully disabled. It's my understanding that most shell replacements work in this fashion, but i cant speak with any certainty.

Well, its not much, but there you go. Im back to running Windows Aero again. shit was a headache. maybe if you know something i dont, you can tell me what i did wrong.

>>

Tantric 10/02/27(Sat)04:06 No. 10 File 126727239189.jpg - (33.76KB , 400x267 , True MS Keyboard ctrl alt del.jpg ) >>9 yes, but only a bit. these VS/shell changes seem to be easier in 7, but that's just the drift i caught while researching changes for vista. not as many people are making them, though. Vista is a total bitch, but i cant afford to go to 7 just yet, and am not crazy about a cracked version (i like my customer support). But, 7 is so much of an improvement over vista, people joke that they intentionally made vista bad so that 7 would shine even more. 7fags, amirite? picture related :(