Is there any way to make an XP theme without that expensive StyleBuilder or StyleXP or whatever it's called?

Yes, but it involves lots of manual labor with Reshacker .

and which files would that be?

%windir%\resources\themes

open your styles with reshacker

Ah, neat. But what about the non-image things, like resizing elements, background colours, changing what parts of the title bar should stretch/repeat and where on it to draw text, etc? Are they all in those INI files stored inside?

i am with you on that and i would like to build one like that too

so what do we need to create our own themes and then allow others to use them

thats why I want to know...
see who can answer this question that is the ORIGINAL topic