XP Service Pack 3 and Visual Styles, SP3 appears to break visual style managers Options

[betona]

Microsoft released SP3 last week, and instantly broke StyleXP for me, which dumps me back to ugly blue/olive/silver toolbar selection (I had no other problems with SP3). I suspect it could work just fine--the problem is a limitation in the StyleXP code that doesn't let it move forward once it senses the new version of XP.

TGTSoft hasn't updated StyleXP in about 2 years, and I'm not all that confident that they'll update it. There are a couple bugs they knew about 3 years ago that never were fixed--such as properly handling multiple XP User Accounts. I registered 3.17 and never saw the reason to pay full price again for minor point upgrade to 3.19; but their one-year upgrade policy will probably require another purchase--that is, if they fix it. As it stands now, they're out of business with SP3 rolling out.

Then there are the DLL patchers, none of which appear to be ready for SP3--I see reports of people saying they don't work.

My needs aren't that exotic--All I really want is a wide variety of colors in simple visual styles, like what CoughDrop and CoolXP4 provide.

So my question is, for Visual Style changing, what do we do now?

[betona]

Update: TGTSoft's not responding, so I'm uninstalling it (backing up my visual styles first in case it removes them).

Answer is to install a hacked uxtheme.dll file. I checked several and used this one:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?show...633040&st=0

You also need to use that replacer utility because it won't let you just replace the file in C:\Windows\System32\--drag the old file into the replacer, then the new one and follow the instructions.

After that, all of my visual styles are available on the Appearance tab of Display Properties, which is perfect.