Copy file dialogue

The taskbar colour also changes

Just a few days ago I thought that I would try to make my plain Windows 7 system look a little bit better. I had thought that maybe changing the colour of my progress bars would do the trick. I set out to find a patched aero.msstyles theme file on the web, and found a couple, yet none were black. The developers had stated that they would not release more colours, nor could they get the taskbar graphics to change colour as well.

A quick run through ResHack and GIMP, and I had my patched file with black resources. It took me a great deal of time to find the resource for the taskbar, in the over 1000 resources in the theme. Regardless, I have the working theme here for anyone wishing to use it.

You can downloaded it from here: Black Progressbars for Windows 7

Please note that you must have the patched Windows theme files installed in order to install custom themes. You can get the files here: Uxtheme (x86 & x64)

To install the theme, run the program Replacer, and follow the instructions to replace the original 3 files with the ones in the uxtheme archive. Make sure to run the program as an administrator. I found that I had to delete the temporary folder it creates, each time I ran it or it would give me an error saying “error extracting data”.

After the uxtheme patch is installed, the rest is easy. Take ownership of the file “C:/Windows/Resources/Themes/Aero” using the Take Ownership explorer extension (Right-click->Take Ownership). I suggest taking a backup copy of the file just in case you want to revert later on. Just change the theme to Windows 7 Basic, then copy the aero.msstyles file from the archive above into “C:/Windows/Resources/Themes/Aero”. Change the theme back to the one you were using before, and then restart (or just log off). You should now have black progress bars!

If you are unsure of how to use any of the software above, just Google it. They are very popular. If you restart at the end and end up with a ‘Windows 95-esque’ theme, then it is because you did not install the uxtheme patch correctly, as it has nothing to do with my theme.