Lost all visual styles except XP & Classic

[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!

 

[Andrew Bailey]

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

 

[darius]

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.

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.

 

[Andrew Bailey]

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