vile

After trying to "restore" the SP2 patcher (thinking maybe if I restored the one I did first it would be back to an unaltered state) I got a ton of "bad image" messages and couldn't boot properly. So I used an Ubuntu live CD to boot up and replace uxtheme.dll manually with a patched one from www.withinwindows.com. Now my themes work perfectly. Probably was something I did wrong Thanks for your help .

That's very weird, I'm not sure. Especially since I upgraded from SP2. I originally installed on here with an SP2 disk so SP0 has never been on this PC. The upgrade went OK as far as I know, nothing else seems to be broken. Guess windows update must have messed something up :/. It might have something to do with the fact that I tried to install the SP2 UXTheme patcher after the upgrade (I wasn't thinking, I was so used to running it on PCs with SP2), but I restored it once I realized it was only for SP2. Unless that somehow restored the wrong version of the file or something.

Yeah, I rebooted after updating to SP3 (windowsupdate asked me to) and after using the patcher. I've emailed you my current dll if you feel like taking a look, thanks .

Just to let you know the patch isn't working for me. I've just got SP3 today through windows update and after applying the patcher when I try to apply a 3rd party msstyles file I get an error "An exception occurred while trying to run <path to theme file>". Maybe I did something wrong...the machine was patched using Uxtheme multi-patcher for SP2 before the update.