UXTheme... and shady online pages

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Midas
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UXTheme... and shady online pages

#1 Post by Midas »

I like to have my Windows (lightly) themed for better enjoyment and readability if possible. After all, you're liable to spend whole years looking at it. And, IMHO, the best themes are those with a touch(!) of retro flavor, harking back to the Windows XP UX. What can I say, I'm weird like that...

But I'm not making this post to digress about my personal tastes but more as a warning signpost for a bunch of online resources that, under the guise of UI customization, are no more than honeypots for ridding the unwary user with nasty adware or worse.

Case in point, as anyone who's ever read a customization tutorial will know, in order to be able apply to apply custom themes to Windows it has to be patched, normally done with a tool called UXTheme; to get it, as it has floated around the web in different versions over the years, the usual and quickest way is to google for it.

And this is where it gets hairy, as one might arrive a locations such uxthemepatcher_dot_com, which is nothing more than a pretty front for downloading malware. Anyone wanting to get UXTheme will fare much better going to reputable sources like Softpedia:
Even spotty sites like https://windowsxlive.net/uxtheme-multi-patcher/ will provide more reliable info -- as well as allow for user feedback. So as the saying goes (and this is my final point): customers beware, here be dragons...

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Userfriendly
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Joined: Tue Nov 27, 2012 11:41 pm

Re: UXTheme... and shady online pages

#2 Post by Userfriendly »

I haven't used a custom visual style ever since UxStyle stopped being developed and Win10 added a proper dark theme. Windows 10 dark theme finally just looks like how I've been changing my theme for WinXP and Win7/8 for years. it only took almost 20 years...

As far as I know, there's two custom vistual style modification tools right now. Theres UltraUXThemePatcher which modifies uxtheme.dll and SecureUxTheme which doesn't modify any system files at all and is probably the safest to use. It's even mentioned by the UltraUXThemePatcher FAQ as an alternative. SecureUxTheme is also from the same dev for OpenHashTab. So its not just some one-off software from some random guy.

UltraUXThemePatcher - https://mhoefs.eu/software_uxtheme.php
mirrors:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/detail ... tcher.html
https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS ... cher.shtml

SecureUxTheme - https://github.com/namazso/SecureUxTheme
some comments in reddit with responses from dev https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comm ... bler_that/

These are the only sites you should check to download them.

If you still use WinXP/Win7/Win8 (you really shouldn't anymore) then I recommend using UxStyle. Not sure if the last few Windows updates on those old OS have stopped it from working but UxStyle was the best one that worked for me. Seems like UXTheme Multi-Patcher 15.0 mentioned on windowsxlive.net is just a rebrand of UxStyle.

UxStyle - https://github.com/riverar/uxstyle/

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Midas
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Re: UXTheme... and shady online pages

#3 Post by Midas »

Yep, I was getting ready to post about SecureUxTheme, which I just found while writing the OP...

Thanks for the updates, anyway, great info as always. 8)

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