Universal UXTheme Patcher

Microsoft Windows XP comes with a rather small pack of visual styles, comprised of the XP Style (with three color schemes) and Classic Style (similar to the older Windows 98 / Me). Later, the MediaCenter Style was added to the thin collection with its Royale (Energy Blue) and Royale Noir. A Zune theme was also made available to the general public a few weeks after, celebrating the launch of Microsoft's Zune media player.

As these officially signed themes were just not enough and the custom themes market was starting to bloom, someone thought that something like Universal UXTheme Patcher would really come in handy for those dying to break their XP visual styles restrictions. The software actually patches Microsoft's `uxtheme.dll,` unleashing the capability of using third-party visual styles.

Universal UXTheme Patcher requires no installation, takes the least of space on your drive and successfully manages to bypass the `Windows File Protection` system. The only thing that really takes time is the necessary restart for the modified DLL to load, while the actual patching process only needs a second or two. Once the system has been rebooted, you can enjoy any of the available visual styles and believe us – their numbers are astronomical.

You can now choose from stylish, slick, colorful, dark or funny themes as your Windows XP desktop companions. Nonetheless, there are some really awesome visual styles on the web that perfectly combine quality of execution and eye-candy while truly recreating the environment without damaging its basics. In fact, some of these visual styles can be easily seen as the rightful start theme of the Windows XP OS – they're that brilliantly done.

The application supports a wide range of Microsoft operating systems with Windows XP as the starting point. The first lane is taken by the Home and Professional editions of XP (RTM to SP2 – yes, SP3 is not supported), followed by the Media Center Edition, Tablet PC Edition and Server 2003. It's compatible with both 32 and 64-bit versions of these operating systems and it effortlessly patches the DLL regardless of the OS's default installation language.

Universal UXTheme Patcher is one of the first applications of its kind to ever hit the market and it has served its users good. One click to open up a whole new universe. It had its few ancestors that only worked on specific XP editions and it can be regarded as the starting point for highly-praised programs like Uxtheme Multi-patcher.