I've installed WinXP Pro twice on an Athlon 700Mhz 512Mb system, and after a few days, my XP theme disappears. The taskbar, windows, everything looks like Windows 98/2000 again, with no skins. I CAN go into the Effects window, and I notice that the XP styles is unchecked. If I check the box again, the skins still won't come back! Also, I can go into the Themes selection screen, change the theme to Classic, apply it, and then change it back to Windows XP theme, and the skin still won't show up. Again, this happens each time I install XP. Originally, I suspected a file getting corrupted, so I installed an IDE Busmaster update on the next re-installation. A few days later, again, it disappears. Anyone have any ideas on how to diagnose this problem? I'm at a loss here.
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Where did my theme go? 1
- Thread starter xyrx
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Masterpjz9
Technical User
maybe the theme service is shutting itself down because of a hardware error. Make sure you are using the most current drivers for windows xp. If XP drivers not available, use 2000 drivers or windows built in drivers. To see if the service is shut down, go to start>control panel> (change the view to classic view)>administrative tools>services in there see if themes is started and set to automatic startup
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I know this is an old post, but I've found out what the cause was. Masterpjz9 was partially right. It was a hardware problem. That's what I get when I buy cheap memory sticks, I guess. I've been having lockup issues on Win2k and XP ever since I got 2 new 256Mb memory sticks from Fry's Electronics. The lockups in the beginning were few and far between, so I didn't draw a connection between memory and the lockups. However, when I moved over to XP, things got really nasty. One of the problems I had was, as I stated above, is my themes would default back to 'classic windows', and I could never turn my theme back on again. The theme service wasn't shutting down, but my guess was that a file was constantly getting corrupted, even after a fresh re-install of XP (format and clean install). After I played around with the memory, I got rid of the offending stick, and bought another one. In the last 3 months, I've had maybe 3 locksup in 3D games that I play, and that's so so way better than before.
Masterpjz9
Technical User
That's great to hear you fixed your Windows Themes problem.
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