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Forum Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 8/9/2008 6:13 AM
Posts: 8,208, Visits: 16,485 |
| | Thought I'd share an odd and, I think, interesting situation with you. My primary home system is a Dell XPS dual core purchased earlier this year. As with all new systems, the first thing I did was delete everything, repartition, and install XP from scratch. Among the tweaks I made was changing the uxtheme.dll for the "patched" version so I could use a theme I've been using for years. For some reason however, I could not change themes from Display Properties. From within that applet, all displays showed incorectly (they appeared "corrupted") and when I tried to switch to any of them I ended up with a completely black screen. The only way to recover was via a repair install. On Richie's suggestion I ended up installing StyleXP and everything worked well. There's a known minor conflict between StyleXP and PerfectDisk's "defrag at boot" option (on the system partition). StyleXP loads very early in the boot process and PD needs complete control of the hd to do an offline defrag. To allow this access, you need to change the "start" setting of StyleXP in the registry and reboot. PD can then do its thing and when XP restarts it is, of course, running the default XP style. You then need to change the StyleXP setting back and reboot so that your desired style will load. Okay. So far so good. Every once in a while I would open Display Properties and examine the various themes I have installed just to see how they looked, and they always appeared corrupted. Just checking  . Well, yesterday I decided to do a boot-time defrag of the system partition so I made the registry change, disabling StyleXP at startup. The defrag went fine and Windows then loaded..... with the modified style. I checked in Display Properties and all themes appeared normal. To be certain StyleXP wasn't running I removed it from "startup" and went into Services and disabled the StyleXP service. I rebooted and again my modified theme / style loaded properly and Display Properties showed all themes correctly. I can think of nothing I've done that would have "fixed" the problem and there are no MS updates that would have interacted with themes. I suppose it might have been one of the Driver updates for the Nvidia Video Card, but why now and not an earlier Driver update (I've installed several in the past 8 months). There was a new system bios flash I installed last week, but I don't think that should have had anything to do with this. And none of the items loading with the system were involved because when the problem first appeared I tried a "clean boot" to make sure it wasn't a conflict. Strange. Just wanted to share
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| | | Senior Forum Advisor
Group: Senior Advisor
Last Login: 12/1/2007 4:53 AM
Posts: 200, Visits: 117 |
| just a note, when the thing aint patched, it shows those NON-MS themes as broken (even though they are not).
so when this type of thing happened to me, it was because i had not achieved uxtheme patching properly.
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This Poster knows NOTHING about VISTA , if your issue was VISTA related , then it don't apply. |
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Forum Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 8/9/2008 6:13 AM
Posts: 8,208, Visits: 16,485 |
| I thought of that at the time Vid, so I uninstalled the file and repatched several times to make sure. I even copied a patched version from another system that I knew was good. But even if that had been the case (and I'm certain it wasn't), it still "fixed itself" for no reason I can determine.
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