Many of you may already know about this, and I’ve been running it for a long time on my system, but I just realized I haven’t blogged about it, and that several people have remarked on it when they’ve seen it on my system so…
When Windows XP first came out, one of the first things I did was switch the theme back to the “Widows Classic” look (which basically looked the same as Windows 2000), because I couldn’t stand the way the default XP theme looked. I think it was mostly the color scheme, but I heard it referred to as the “Playschool” theme several times and it really seemed like an appropriate summary - I really didn’t like it.
Anyway, some time ago I came across this Royale Noir theme and have been using it on my XP installation ever since. It’s basically an alternate color variation of the “Royale” theme distributed with Media Center Edition. A download link and very simple installation instructions are at the bottom of the link in this paragraph.