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W3bbo

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Posts posted by W3bbo

  1. Most of those replacement icons are actually made by Microsoft but already used elsewhere in their products. Some other icons, including the Vize program icon, were done by other people. XPero sorted out the arrangements for those icons and I don't have any of his records relating to the original authors so I can't help you out here.

    Do note that Microsoft prohibits use of their icons and other pieces of artwork as design elements in things like website designs though they are allowed for appropriate use in an application (desktop or web) such as for toolbar buttons. To that end, I think the xpze and Vize websites are really pushing the limit on what you can do with MS's official icons and wallpaper artwork.

    If this is for an internal application, I don't think Microsoft really cares. I've got many contacts at Microsoft, including many at rather senior positions and they all seem to have a live-and-let-live attitude as regards this stuff, MS Legal only gets involved if it's serious, and this is not serious :). BTW Visual Studio (since 2005) comes with a massive icon and toolbar art library for this exact purpose.

  2. You can't. The vertical size of the button is controlled by Explorer itself and cannot be changed by visual styles or anything short of disassembling the taskbar code and fixing it that way (which is beyond my current abilities).

  3. Open up your C:\Boot.ini file in Notepad and remove the \BOOTLOGO and \NOGUIBOOT switches, then save, then restart. If you cannot save the file uncheck "Read only" in the file's properties. If you cannot find C:\Boot.ini then enable the showing of both hidden and protected system files under Folder Options.

  4. Can be posible to put in your future versions a tool that can cange the icons (not the system ones) without installing and reinstalling?

    Maybe, in the long long long term (think: years), but there really isn't much point since you can just re-install it again.

    For all intents and purposes, xpize is "done"; although there are a few things left over and a few minor bugs (some of those corrected by HellRacer's "xpize 5R6b" release) I don't think it's worth my time cranking out another release for now. Maybe next year, or at Christmas if I'm feeling nice.

    I must apologise for not uploading the xpize package sources yet. I've been saying that for months.

  5. String tables are just pure text, you cannot change the appearance of the text since that's done from within code (although some programs might specify font names in string tables).

    There are a few tricks you can do with string tables: under Windows XP if you delete both string table entries for "Start" and "start" in explorer.exe then your start button will physically disappear from your taskbar. You can give yourself a smaller start button by making the text zero-length, or give yourself a huge button by padding it out with whitespace characters.

  6. You're all wrong :)

    It's due to changes in the Windows resource model that were implemented in Windows Vista (and so carry on to Windows 7).

    Windows Vista added "MUI Files" where localisable resources (such as string tables and dialogs) are moved to language-specific PE files located under a folder (named "en-US" or "de", for example) whereas language-neutral resources, like icons and bitmaps are kept within the original EXE.

    In this case, the string tables and dialogs for English explorer.exe is now located under C:\Windows\en-US\explorer.exe.mui

    Anolis Resourcer is "MUI Aware" and so it doesn't load these resources when you open an EXE (since you have to explicitly opt-out of this behaviour by calling Vista-specific resource enumeration functions) however you can still open the language-specific MUI files fine.

    Visual Studio (all versions: 6.0/1998, 7.0/2002, 7.1/2003, 8.0/2005, and 9.0/2008) is not MUI Aware, so the Win32 resource functions will return the resources located in the MUI files in addition to the specified file.

    Finally, other resource editors, like ResHacker, ResTuner, and Restorator are all written in Borland Delphi and use their own resource-hacking libraries that parse the PE file format themselves (which is why they couldn't open x64 files until recently) and so don't rely on Win32 for enumerating resources for them, which is why they don't list MUI resources either.

    Hope that helps!

  7. I'm on xp home SP3, it doesn't have the boot.ini, so um.. what do i do? Lol

    The file is hidden. You can open it without needing to change your file display settings by going Control Panel > System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Settings > System Startup > Edit

    ...this will open up your boot configuration file in Notepad where you can make changes. Note that boot.ini may be read-only.

  8. How do you do that workaround? I am not very good with these things so be descriptive if you know how.

    Open up a cmd.exe window, change to the directory where you downloaded xpize5R6.exe then type:

    xpize5R6.exe /ignoreCondition

    Then continue through the wizard as normal.

    If you don't know how to do that, then do this:

    1. Find out where xpize5R6.exe was downloaded to (often either your Desktop or a folder called "Downloads" under My Documents if you're using Firefox 3.5)
    2. Go Start > Run > cmd.exe
    3. In the black window that pops up, type "cd Desktop" or "cd My Documents\Downloads" (depending on where it was downloaded to) and press Enter
    4. Type "xpize5R6.exe /ignoreCondition"
    5. Continue through the wizard as normal

  9. The "XPize Guide" is only for XPize 4.7. It doesn't not apply to xpize 5. I'm tempted to remove it from the website to stop this confusion.

    As I said, xpize 5 does not have any command-line switches that enable the user to alter what is installed and what isn't. You'll have to do it manually.

  10. I'm afraid I'm not sure what you're talking about.

    XPize 4.x let you customise the installation with various command-line switches, yes, but they were for use with unattended installs, you get far more control with the checkboxes in the GUI wizard.

    xpize 5 doesn't have any switches for customizing the installation for a variety of reasons.

    What do you mean by "making the standalone installer" and "make it onto an add-on"? What are you trying to accomplish?

  11. That blue colour is the desktop colour of the default user, it's the colour you'd get if there wasn't any wallpaper set.

    If you use the Welcome Screen then by default the background colour is black, so you don't notice it. The key is HK_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors\Background

  12. You can switch between visual styles and wallpapers via the Display control panel. If you'd like a different Welcome Screen or Resource Bitmaps style you'll have to re-run xpize setup.

  13. The bootscreen is something else.

    The wallpaper flash you get before the welcome screen loads is actually the desktop wallpaper of the "DEFAULT" user account (which is used as the profile for which the welcome screen runs under).

    You can change the wallpaper (and other settings) of that by going: Registry > HKEY_USERS > .DEFAULT > Control Panel > Desktop and changing the wallpaper keys in there.

    If you're using the welcome screen then the wallpaper will appear first for a second or two, before the welcome screen window is rendered on top of it. If you have a multi-monitor setup you'll see the wallpaper on your secondary displays. If you disable the welcome screen and use the GINA logon instead then you'll see the wallpaper behind the authentication dialog.

  14. This is to do with XP Mode, which is actually a modified instance of VirtualPC 2007 combined with Remote Desktop. The virtual display in XP Mode is actually an RDP session and not the output of the emulated S3 Trio64 graphics chipset in VirtualPC (which is why VirtualPC in Windows 7 can run Aero Glass/DWM, as well as to provide Application Publishing).

    One quirk with using RDP for this is that the cursor becomes the responsibility of several discrete components of the system: typically the RDP client draws the cursor because waiting for updates from the server would take too long, but the RDP client defers cursor rendering to the server if the cursor is 32-bits (and not a 256-color cursor as the Windows XP cursors are), and often the RDP client doesn't hide the client computer's cursor.

    I'm afraid there is no solution to get the Fedora Inverse cursors working under XP Mode on Windows 7. I don't personally use that cursor scheme myself anyway (I use "Windows Standard Black").

  15. I understand that, but why does it matter? It's not big of a deal as I see it.

    like I said, I don't think there isn't anyway of changing it to the XP style.

    Your best bet is to downgrade to the latest version that had the XP style theme.

    The menubar is defined with various graphical resources within one of the messenger DLL files, I suppose you could swap them out with ones that match your current Windows XP visual style, but it would just look awkward.

    Why not stick with Messenger 8.5? It still runs fine on my desktop (but that may be because XPx64 users get a special dispensation from Microsoft since Messenger 2009 isn't supported on XPx64)

  16. Hi W3bbo - thanks for the response & suggestions.

    Starting 'Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)' is no different and has no positive effect. IE still doesn't launch, and other programs still won't start etc, as per the original problem.

    That sounds like a very serious issue and I don't think xpize is solely responsible.

    Why would the IE engine work ok within FF like this, yet not as a standalone application?

    There are many potential reasons, but finding out if any of them are applicable would be tricky.

    - How do I correctly uninstall XPize? (Add & Remove Programs?)

    Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > xpize

    The xpize option will not be listed on the list if you didn't create a backup during installation (and so you will be unable to uninstall xpize). The backup is usually created in a folder under %programfiles%\Anolis\

    When you suggest uninstalling XPize and you say, 'which will restore your system files to thier original state, it doesn't "unpatch" them' - does that mean that my system WILL or WILL NOT go back to exactly how it looked before I installed XPize (the standard Microsoft Zune theme)? What XPize changes, if any, would remain?

    • System files that had their resources replaced ("patched") will be replaced with their original versions (which were copies made during installation)
    • Installed theme files, like visual styles, wallpapers, and cursors, will be deleted from your filesystem
    • Appearance settings such as the current visual style and wallpaper selection will be reset to how they were just prior to installation

  17. If you can't kill a process using the Task Manager, try the command-line "taskkill /im iexplore.exe /f" (the /f switch is the "force kill" command). If that doesn't work then it means a driver is keeping a handle open which is stopping Windows from killing a process.

    Does starting "Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)" have any effect?

    Also, try uninstalling xpize (which will restore your system files to their original state, it doesn't "unpatch" them) and seeing if that corrects the issue.

  18. k, I've downloaded it. I'll include it in the next release, if there ever is one.

    Oh, ok. I thought I did read something about a planned R7...

    Thanks anyway!

    If I do an R7, it'll be around Christmas time, assuming I don't win any internships at the places I've applied for.

  19. The installer checks for the PendingFileRenameOperations registry key value as well as the Windows Update "RequiresRestart" value. If either or both of these values are present then setup will refuse to run.

    You can bypass this check by running the installer with the command-line switch /ignoreCondition

    ...that switch will also bypass the platform check (that you're running SP3) and a few other safeguards so exercise caution.

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