MSSTYLES is a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

file format, that contains the bitmaps and

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

for the

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

skinning engine, first introduced in Windows Whistler Build 2250. The engine, in its unmodified state, only fully applies .msstyles files that have been digitally signed by

, such as Luna or the Zune theme. The default Windows XP style is known as Luna, but additional custom-made styles are available on the Internethowever, few are digitally signed. Four other signed styles for Windows XP include Royale ( Media Center Edition) (

Energy Blue Windows XP visual styles are Skin (computing), customizations of the graphical user interface of Windows XP. "Luna", "Royale", "Zune", and "Embedded" are codenames of the official visual styles designed for Windows XP by Microsoft. Since Windows XP ...

), Royale Noir, Windows Embedded Standard CTP Refresh, and the Zune Style. Unsigned styles can be used via various methods, by means of manually patching or replacing system files or automatically by one of the programs made for this purpose. These programs are usually called "UxTheme patchers" from the name of the XP library that required patching, UxTheme.dll, despite that recent Windows versions require patches to different files. Many popular and freely distributed patchers can be found online, often using different ways to enable custom themes.

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and later also use .msstyles files for skinning (like the Aero.msstyles file), however the format of these files is significantly different, so .msstyles files are not transferable between Windows Vista and Windows XP. This version of .msstyles file contains PNG images and

. There is a manual way to replace three DLL files (uxtheme.dll, shsvcs.dll and themeui.dll) to use unsigned custom visual styles in Windows Vista.

File format

.msstyles files are 32-bit PE files, however they don't contain code or ordinary data. Instead they store all style information in resources. Microsoft provided styles contain PE version metadata, despite Explorer not displaying this data for .msstyles files in recent Windows versions. PE signing is not used, instead a custom signature is appended to the file.

Signature format

Offsets in the following table are relative to end of file.

References

External links

VistaGlazz - UxTheme patcherPatched file repository
Windows files Digital container formats {{windows-stub

File format

Signature format

See also

References

External links