Comment by CableNinja
4 days ago
The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.
Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
At launch you had 3 themes (blue, green, and silver) as well as classic where you had all the customization of Win2k's settings. Later on (SP3-ish) you got a zone orange/dark theme which was nice.
To do more you either used WindowBlinds or just grabbed a patched UxTheme32.dll which would accept unsigned theme files. Once you did that you had an almost silly number of options to try out from various web sites.