XP Themes Help

How To Create Xp Themes

There are two common methods of creating and editing visual styles, the first being with reshacker or resbuilder, the second with TGTSoft’s StyleBuilder. The second is both easier and more stable, and it was we’ll be discussing accordingly. This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of StyleBuilder. If you don’t, there are plenty of other resources. This article will only be covering some of the more advanced functions.

To Discuss

get rid of start button text
compact start menu
(done) thinner taskbar
thin caption bars
(done) shellstyle?
borderless windows
textless captionbars
hidden’ caption buttons, that show on mouseover – simply make the first frame invisible, by using magic pink
additional xml editing, adding properties like buttontext, windowtext etc
please add on

Any information about what to edit in a shellstyle.dll can be found here:

http://de.geocities.com/webfactorx/shellstyle/index.html

Thin Taskbar

The default taskbar height is 24 pixels. This can be reduced by setting the top and bottom CONTENT margins to 0 in:

General -> Taskband -> FlashButton
Taskband -> Toolbar -> Button
Taskband -> Toolbar -> DropdownButton
Taskbar -> Toolbar -> Button
Taskbar -> Toolbar -> DropdownButton
TrayNotifyHoriz -> TrayNotify -> Background