Delve Into Lunacy

** Update ** If you tried downloading the ZIP file in this post prior to 11/12/06 and received an error stating that the ZIP file was corrupt, go ahead and try again. I’ve posted a new ZIP file that shouldn’t have that issue any longer.

By default in Windows XP you have three choices for themes: blue, silver and olive. Personally, I’ve always used olive but I never was a huge fan of any of the three. Now normally if you wanted things like the taskbar and window borders to be a different color you would have to use a third party application that "skins" the entire desktop. Unfortunately, any of those that I’ve ever tried just tend to eat up lots of memory while running and usually never produce the best of results anyway.

However, the other day I ran across a blog site (here) where they had discovered an official prototype theme called Royale Noir that was intended for Windows Media Center but was never implemented. It is very similar to the Longhorn palette, if not identical, which I personally fell in love with the first time I saw it. The best part is since it’s an official theme you don’t have to use any third party tool to use it.

Here’s a compilation screenshot to show what the taskbar, system tray and active/inactive window borders look like.

If you would like to use the theme you’ll need to start by downloading it here: Royale Noir Download.

Once you have it downloaded, extract the Royale Noir folder to the <Windows Install Directory>\Resources\Themes\ directory. Your Windows install directory is normally C:\Windows or C:\WINNT. You can see an example of the full path in the image above.

Now go to the directory you just extracted and double-click on the luna.msstyles file. This will open a Display Properties window where you will want to change the Color Scheme value to Royale Noir as shown in the image below.

Click on OK. It will start applying the new theme which can take a little time so don’t get impatient…it hasn’t locked up or anything like that. Once it’s done applying you’re finished.