Missing Tabs on Display Properties

  • Thread starter Thread starter Scott
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S

Scott

Windows XP Home SP1

The only tab that shows on Display Properties is Themes. Desktop,
Screen Saver, Appearance, and Settings are missing.
Both with the onboard Intel vide chipset and with an ATI PCI card
plugged in for troubleshooting.

I remember something like this several years ago, but can not find
anything in newsgroup or Microsoft searches.

Anyone?
 
Scott said:
Windows XP Home SP1

The only tab that shows on Display Properties is Themes. Desktop,
Screen Saver, Appearance, and Settings are missing.
Both with the onboard Intel vide chipset and with an ATI PCI card
plugged in for troubleshooting.

I remember something like this several years ago, but can not find
anything in newsgroup or Microsoft searches.

Anyone?
Click to expand...
Check out #128 on the right.
'Tweaks and Tips' (http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm)
Best,
Treeman
 
I had the same problem, in my case the only thing that showed up was
themes, however if you changed the theme and click "Apply" the tabs
would temporarily come back until you closed Display Properties and
opened it back up. Also, if I pressed Shift+Tab as soon as I opened up
Display Properties the hidden/missing tabs would be selected and I
could use the arrow keys to select the different tabs.

Look to see if you are missing C:\WINDOWS\WindowsShell.Manifest
I had to copy this file back into my Windows directory and it fixed the
problem for me.

Without this file Shell32.dll doesn't know to use the new version of
Comctl32.dll (which supports themes) rather than the old version. By
design, the new version(s) sit in C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\... and the older
version is in C:\WINDOWS\system32 for compatibility reasons.

DS
 
DS Thank you so much for this posting. Every other info source seemed to
focus on the registry and the "policies" key. Do you know how you lost your
windowsshell.manifest file? I'm not sure how i list mine and am a bit
concerned that perhaps other system files may be missing. My system seems to
be working like a charm otherwise.
 
Missing tabs

Hello!

First time posting here...great site. I was reading your post about missing tabs, and I have the same problem and have been trying EVERYTHING to fix it, to no avail. I tried your Ctrl+Tab trick, and it worked when I used my arrow keys. This is the first time I've seen the other options in a month, so it was pretty exciting. (yes, I need to get a life, but I'll move on)

I did a search for the C:\WINDOWS\WindowsShell.Manifest file and indeed found it. Why am I still having problems? Any ideas?

Thanks for reading this!!

Regards from Kansas,

Annika

p.s. Forgot to tell you that I'm running windows xp service pack 2.
 
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