does anyone use this program? i liked having it for "visual styles" and it worked, but then when i booted up my comp, it had like the windows 98 taskbar, and kept asking for money for stylexp. is there a way to avoid this so my stylexp lasts?
Style XP seems to clunky to me, not to mention they still attach 3rd party junk (spyware) to some of their themes even if you pay for it. Windowsblinds has gotten much better and uses much less resources than older versions. I use neither.
I went to Belchfire.net and installed the "multi-patcher". It replaces the uxtheme.dll allowing you to install unsigned visual styles and themes within Windows without having a 3rd party app installed.
The patcher is free though they do have a pay product as well. Use the multi-patcher, it's nice. They have a full tutorial explaining it all and allot of nice themes and styles. You can use themes and styles from anywhere if you don't like the ones on Belchfire so long as you can extract them properly.
Here's the tutorial for installing visual styles and themes once you have the "multi-patcher" installed.
Here is the Royal Full Menu visual style I'm using now. You can get it here.
Here is a screen of one of my older desktops using the Royal green style, it has 6 colors total to choose from. Mind you that is just one visual style of many that can be used with the Multi-Patcher.
I do what tribalsun does. The program patches the uxtheme.dll file to where third party themes could be used. It does not run any other program in the background, so there is no extra resources used at all.
I have used STyleXP with no problem to anything on my system. Used it for a couple of months. I use Windowsblinds now only cause it has more to offer for my liking.