Lost all visual styles except XP & Classic

  • Thread starter Thread starter darius
  • Start date Start date
D

darius

Hi

I don't know what I did but I've lost all visual styles except for
WindowsXP and Windows Classic. In Appearance, in the "windows and
buttons" drop down list, those are the only choices. My *.msstyles files
are still under windows\resources\themes where they've been all along.

If I double click an msstyle file, the display dialog opens up with the
appearance tab showing but it just shows the current style. Themes
service is automatic and running. If I choose Windows XP style, I get
the 'blue" look so theme seems to be working. It just doesn't recognize
any other styles. If I choose a theme that links to any msstyle other
than Luna, I get a black preview window. This is bad!

(I don't have system restore enabled, so that won't help.)

Help!
 
Hi Darius,

Sounds to me like you have either updated to SP1 but not updated uxtheme.dll
or it has been overwritten with the default file. Do a google on SP2
uxthemepatcher.

Andy
 
Hi Darius,

Sounds to me like you have either updated to SP1 but not updated
uxtheme.dll or it has been overwritten with the default file. Do a
google on SP2 uxthemepatcher.
Click to expand...

I installed StyleXP and used it to apply a visual style, and now visual
styles work again!

I download the uxtheme multi patcher from neowin and applied it.
uxtheme.dll now has version

6.00.2900.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)

That looks right (I have sp2). The odd thing is now I cannot save any
theme in Display | Themes | Save as... It looks like it's doing it, but
no file is saved. If I select an existing .theme to write over, it
actually deletes it!

I searched google groups and looks like other people have the exact same
problem. They all got the same advice: get the patch, tho I don't know
if that fixed the problem. It didn't seem to work for me.
 
Hi Darius,

I'll assume that the replacement uxtheme.dll you have is the right one for
SP2. Next make sure that you copy it to C:\WINDOWS\system32 AND
C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386.

If you don't copy it to the i386 folder then windows copies over the
system32 version with the one in the i386 folder.

Hope that helps

Andy
 
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