How to Apply a Windows Vista Style XP Theme

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For the breadcrumb navigation, you have to download and install the QT Tab Bar from its Wiki site. To install this feature, you have to have the .Net Framework 2.0 installed.

We are continuing our quest to make Windows XP look like Vista. Go to Vishal Gupta’s website and download Vista VG with Ultimate Theme with Search Bar (just fyi, the Search Bar is no more than an eye candy - it’s fake.) When you open the file you downloaded, you will see four folders. Go into the Fonts folder and copy all the files inside to C:\Windows\Fonts folder. This will install the Segoe font, which is the default system font in Windows Vista. Then copy the “Theme” folder to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes folder.

Not done yet. Right-click on your desktop, select Properties and switch to the Appearance tab. Under Windows and Buttons and select Aero 32. Click Apply and then OK and exit. Go back to where you have the four folders that were extracted when you opened the theme. Go into the Bottom Common Tasks folder, where you will see the shellstyle.dll file. Copy this file to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Vista VG Ultimate\Shell\Aero32 folder. If, under Windows and Buttons you selected some other style such as “Black 32,” then you have to copy the shellstyle.dll file to the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Vista VG Ultimate\Shell\Black32 folder. From which folder you copy the shellstyle.dll file depends on which “Windows and Buttons” you are using.

OK, Windows XP icons do not fit in our Vista view. To change our icons, we will download the Stardock’s Icon Packager program. It is a trial version, but it this is not important for our purposes, since we will only use it for a couple of minutes. When you download and install, head on to download Vista Icon Pack for Windows XP. After you download the icon pack, open it with Icon Packager. Done.

Just a note: you can uninstall the Icon Packager program from your system if you will no longer use it. I also advise running a tuning utility (such as CCleaner) to clean up the relevant registry entries and other leftover files.

Of course, we will take care about our drive status icons in the “My Computer” view. To do that we download the Drive Status. After the download, we open the rar file and install the program. Now we see all the status of our drives in a graphical way under the icons.

Approaching our final step, we will add thumbnail previews, which will allow us to see the contents of the opened windows when we hover our mouse pointer to the taskbar. We revisit the Crystal XP site and download the Visual Tooltip program. For the true transparency of the window titles, we download True Transparency program from the same website. There is no additional task here. Install and enjoy.

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If you are still with me, you have successfully installed Windows Vista style XP theme to your computer and are enjoying it (the screenshot on the left is the "after" image). However, please note that all the programs/items that we have installed steal from your computer’s resources. If you have a relatively new computer, you are most likely to ignore this but if you have an older one you will possibly experience some slowdown. If Windows XP complains that some system files are changed during the process and wants to revert the process, doing so will not enable you to carry on changing your theme.

What’s more, we have covered the basics to change your Windows XP theme. If you want to try additional themes, you can follow the instructions from the theme’s developer and install more or less the same way. Unsigned themes will not be a matter for you because we have patched the uxtheme.dll at the very beginning.