Is it necessary to run both MultiPatcher and StyleXP?

Sorry, but I haven't quite got the hang of all this stuff yet

No. Multipatcher patches your uxtheme.dll file so you can then load unsigned visual styles and themes. Just there's no nice interface to load them. Once you patch the file, you download the theme file .zip or .rar, unzip to c:\windows\resources\themes, then browse to this location and double-click the .msstyles or .theme file from the zip you just extracted. That loads up the theme in Display Preferences, and you then just click 'Apply' to apply it.

StyleXP patches uxtheme.dll in memory, but has a nice GUI to make it much easier to load and manage themes. So it's really the GUI you're paying the money for. But all you really need to do is just patch your uxtheme.dll file and then use the manual method to load up your themes.

Thanks hamesh.

So, if there's no GUI for MultiPatcher, is it just a matter fo double-clicking the
"UXTheme Multi-Patcher 4.0.exe" file, and the patching gets done automatically?
Does it at least give a notification that the "uxtheme.dll" file got patched?

I hope it doesn't drop me into DOS, 'coz that's waaaaay over my head

I read many of your forum answers and tuts, and there's a lot of stuff about finding all
the "uxtheme.dll" and "uxtheme.dl_" files, and rename them. Does the MultiPatcher
deal with that? or do I still have to rename them before I run the MultiPatcher?

It's been a while since I've run it, but yes it should find any backups and do all that for you. It will indicate if things went okay and can also unpatch, for example, if/when XP SP3 comes out - you'll likely need to unpatch it for SP3 to install correctly.

There will very likely be an update to multipatcher to work with SP3.

Thanks again hamesh.

You're a gold nugget