FAQ: Using XP msstyles on Vista

By Frogboy
in Tips, Tweaks & Customization

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Grand Master

Frogboy Administrators

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There are thousands of excellent msstyles available for Windows XP. Unfortunately, they won't work on Windows Vista because the file format on Vista is much different and more limited than it was on XP.

However, here's a utility that will let you take an XP msstyles and turn it into a WindowBlinds skin which will run fine on Windows Vista (and on Vista, WB uses the DWM so it's as "native" as you're going to get).

http://www.draginol.com/files/MSImport.zip

To get WindowBlinds, visit http://www.windowblinds.net/

Good luck.

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random_n

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Point of curiosity: how does the start menu look or behave? The flyout "All Programs" menu is still something that I really miss from XP, and I can imagine that embedding the new scroll-bar menu into existing styles would mess them up a fair bit.

:huh:

Grand Master

Denis W. Veteran

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Yeah. It still needs some work; I imported Capric0rn's Watercolor Blue Emico and spent almost two hours trying to fix up the damn fonts (WHY DOES WB INSIST ON TAHOMA AND ARIAL 8 POINTS?) before giving up.

I'm guessing this separate converter was quickly stripped out of Skinstudio 5 Professional as people were complaining about having to redownload Skinstudio 5 to convert XP msstyles.

Grand Master

Frogboy Administrators

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Yea, it's slightly updated from what was in SkinStudio Pro 5. But this way, there's a stand alone way to do it without having to go and hunt down SkinStudio 5.

It works really well with most skins but it's not perfect. It'll generally get you somewhere between 90% and 100% of the way there.

Grand Master

Island Dog

Posted
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Winzip complains that there is no directory sturcture, Windows Compressed Zipped Folders gives me the slightly humerous error, 'Nothing to Do' with an OK button. Any chance of an rar?

No problems here. Anyone else having this trouble?

Also remember that once you have it imported, you can open it in SkinStudio 6 and make any adjustments as needed. Many times it's just a case of adjust the margins or something simple like that. :)

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