 Hacking XP Themes
Saturday, 16 December 2006
If your corporate “standard operating environment” precludes you from changing the default (blue) Windows XP desktop theme and your system administrators have disabled your registry editor, here’s an alternative way of doing it:
Open up a command shell window by clicking on the “Start” button and selecting the “Run” menu option. Export the ThemeManager registry key by typing in
REG EXPORT "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager" THEME.REG
(all on one line) in the command shell. This will create a text file called “THEME.REG” which you will edit in the next step. Edit the file you just created by typing in
START NOTEPAD THEME.REG
in the command shell and change the subkey ColorName from NormalColor to either HomeStead or Metallic, depending on whether you want an olive or silver theme. Import your changes back into the registry by typing in
REG IMPORT THEME.REG in the command shell.
You will need to log off and back on again for the changes to take affect.
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