My rant about uxtheme patching and msstyles

I'm in a ranting mood today. So I'm going to talk about the whole msstyles, uxtheme, thing on Windows XP.  Now this rant is not aimed at people who choose to make msstyles. I have a very high opinion of anyone who takes time to share with the world anything they create regardless of whether it's for Litestep, msstyles, Hoverdesk, or of course our stuff.

Windows XP comes with its own "visual style engine". That's how you get the blue, silver, and green "styles". But that's all there are. That's because the interface to change them, uxtheme.dll will only use Microsoft digitally signed msstyles (the file that contains the "visual style").  So if you want more, you've got two choices: 1) You can make your own format and apply them (which is what WindowBlinds does) or 2) You can try to crack the security out so that you can use unsigned msstyles.

This is a bit of a sore point for me as a software developer because certain..companies have made it out that they are actually skinning Windows when in fact all they've done is crack the security built into uxtheme.dll.  Hey, if you want to mess with your system DLLs then it's your system, go for it. But what really rips me is how companies try to make it out like patching uxtheme.dll is somehow a safe and easy thing. It is if you're reasonably technical. But those who advocate that don't tend to show up when a new Windows XP service pack shows up and the system won't boot or their title bars are all missing or whatever.  The same company doing this stuff is planning on adding support to change the "boot screen".  I somehow doubt they'll make it clear that to change the boot screen you have to patch the actual Windows kernel (which is why we don't mess with that).  Similarly, those patching uxtheme are stuck having to replace their shellstyles.dll. There are whole websites now that allow people to essentially distribute copyrighted parts of the Windows OS without a) any regard to the piracy issues and without recognizing that when you replace the actual code binaries, bad things may happen in the future. 

That said, I have nothing against people patching uxtheme.dll to apply their own hacked msstyles (there's no such thing as a pure .msstyles file -- they are actually a .DLL renamed with graphics resources inside which means, amongst other things, it's a dead end -- come Longhorn, .msstyles go bye bye).  I just wish its proponents (as well as companies that make a profit off of cracking Microsoft's digital signing security) would be up front about what they do instead of passing what they're doing A) as "their" work and Stop making it out like patching out system DLL security is somehow a "native" way of getting more visual styles. To me native doesn't include the words "patching" and "system files" in the same sentence.

And patching uxtheme certainly doesn't add features. It just means you can, basically, replace the bitmaps of the Windows XP blue, silver, green, msstyle.  This is probably why when Microsoft wants to add more visual styles for a promotion like with the Xbox or Age of Mythology it's WindowBlinds they use as well as what they recommend to OEMs. WindowBlinds doesn't hack the system. What really galls me is the idea that someone would charge the unwary for the patch. It would be like charging money for a program that changes wallpaper because users didn't know where the wallpaper changing dialog was.  I probably wouldn't have such a hard time with the charging of such patching if there was some value-add.

So that's my two cents on that subject. Incidentally, *I* do have my uxtheme patched because I use both WindowBlinds visual styles and msstyles. I certainly didn't pay to do it, I did it myself with a hex editor. But I've been digging into OS internals for over a decade and I don't freak out if my system doesn't boot up. I know how to get back to a command line and mess around with system restore if need be.  But that's the thing, I know what I'm getting myself into. I suspect most normal people with lives who are interested in customizing their PCs just want to download a program that will work well. Not one that may or may not work on the next service pack.

The only other sore point about msstyles is their relentless advocates. People who would, if they could, wreck skinning for the long term because they hate the idea of someone making money on customizing.  Hey, if you want to use msstyles, go for it. It's your PC. But don't go on some web forum and tell people it's somehow better than WindowBlinds because, sorry, that's ridiculous. Besides being relativley primitive in features, msstyles are slower, use more RAM, are larger to download, don't fully skin existing programs, and have only a fraction of the # of visual styles that are available for WindowBlinds. Oh and did I mention they're doomed after XP?

That isn't to say WindowBlinds is perfect. But it is to Photoshop what msstyles are to MS Paint. MS Paint is not a bad start but don't try to argue that it's better than Photoshop. Oh, and in this analogy, Photoshop uses less RAM than MS Paint.

These days the more vocal msstyles zealots will try to say "Well, all the WindowBlinds skins are bloated and ugly.." which means, of course, that they didn't really bother to look. If you scan the net for msstyles, you'll find that they are typically just like Windows XP except now a different hue. Maybe they're purplish.  Of course, you can do this with WindowBlinds without having to find a new visual style since WindowBlinds can change the color of a skin on the fly. That doesn't mean there aren't great msstyles floating around on the net -- there are (of course, SkinStudio can convert them to WindowBlinds since WindowBlinds is a superset of features but I digress). 

But the thing is, WindowBlinds has been around for 5 or so years now, its community has moved way beyond the initial hacker demographic that the msstyles user base is at (and likely to stay at since, like I said, it does require you to crack system DLLs to use which ain't for the average user).  So the styles and tastes are all over the place now. But yea, it too for the first couple of years mainly fixated on those minimalist "Look, it's like KDE!" skins.