W3bbo

Did you install XPize 4.7 or xpize 5R6?

You installed XPize 4.7 and set the system icon size to 128x128. That's your problem: only a handful of icons are available in that size and the rest will be upscaled. I take it you're running XP SP2. Why aren't you running SP3? That way you can install xpize 5.

In Windows XP Service Pack 2 Microsoft added a "safe" way to give a system a static bootscreen: add the flags "/NOGUIBOOT" and "/BOOTLOGO" to your OS in C:\Boot.ini then place the bitmap you want to use in C:\Windows\Boot.bmp (note the bitmap must be 640x480 16-color). If you want to restore the old bootscreen, just remove those two flags from your Boot.ini file (you don't need to delete the Boot.bmp file though).

This has always been the plan from the beginning (since I want to build my Anolis framework into something that can compete with Stardock's IconPackager) however from my PoV it's easier just to build a "fire and forget" system that patches the system and makes a single backup of system state. Building a GUI around a variation of it that would allow people to swap between different Anolis packages is possible, but a long-term task. Of course, I'll remind everyone that Anolis is GPL-licensed and they're free to submit patches or improvements to the codebase that would make this possible.

The past 2 days have seen me get a lot of emails from the xpize website seeking support; I didn't think much of it: I just thought my users were getting stupider. But no... it turns out we've been featured on LifeHacker, and from there other sites have picked it up. It's worth pointing out that LifeHacker only published their story yesterday, but they got it from another (less popular) site who published it in July, who in turn got it from Long Zheng's istartedsomething, and Long only ran that story on xpize because he owed me a favour (that... and he's a personal friend of mine anyway). So yeah. I'm famous, woo! In case anyone's wondering: Lifehacker has given me 12,000 more daily visitors. I can also announce that the number of xpize 5R6 installs has now surpassed 13,000, and my servers are now pulling 8mbps (95th percentile) let's see how long this'll go on before I get hit with the bandwidth bill. Maybe I should bring back the PayPal Donations thing?

Question #1: Why did you install XPize 4.7 when xpize 5 has been out several months now? Note that XPize 4.7 is not supported on Windows XP SP3, nor should anyone still be running SP2 either.

It isn't, trust me.

Explorer should start after you close the run-once RTF document. See if the issue reproduces after restarting your computer.

Can you elaborate on "missing the icon for Windows Media Player"? Are your icons for media files (MP3, WMA, MPEG, AVI, etc) incorrect or just showing the default unknown icon? Or do you mean the program icon for WMP is missing and is now showing the default unknown icon in its place?

I'm afraid I can't use this. The AVI resource does actually animate: the RIFF document contains 4 frames, one for each state of the traffic-light icon. I'm surprised an icon resource works as a replacement, but your icon file contains only 1 sub-image and won't show the different states of the Quota process (Stopped, Scanning, OK).

The logoff confirmation window's icon appears fine on my computer. I suspect it only applies to your Windows' language edition.

Today, I thought I'd finally get round to upgrading the RAM in the server xpize is on. That resulted in about 30 minutes' downtime from 2000h until 2030h BST (UTC+1) and that procedure went off without a hitch and everything was back to normal after restarting. About an hour later, I remoted into the server to fix some longstanding configuration issues and do an initial reboot after clearing the server's logs (to check for any new problems). Again, this went off fine. Then just now I was trying to solve a problem with my hypervisor, so I disabled the firewall and... the connection died. Yes, disabling the firewall resulted in a loss of all connectivity. I called my datacentre and they're sending a guy out to take a look at my rack, I hope to have it back up online shortly. Yes, this is a huge embrassement. UPDATE: I've got the servers backonline after getting the datacentre staff to take a quick look and give the whole she-bang a powercycle. Crude, but effective. I wish I could afford a proper KVM-over-IP solution, but the stuff I need starts at £360.

Hmm, then clearly my software isn't setting the extension's type reference to the newly created type. I'll fix this bug in the next release.

File-type registrations are split into two types: the extension, and the associated type. There is a one-to-many relationship: one file type can have many file extensions. Note that a file extension can exist, but not be associated with any type. Windows's behaviour for handling these types of files is undefined. In this case, the ".bin" and ".mov" extensions are already defined in your registry hive, but don't refer to an existing file type definition. Anolis Installer will create that definition (and set the right icon) and should be configuring the extension to point to that type. You're setting the XML right, but clearly something isn't working after installation. Make a note of the registry key "HKCU\.bin" and look for a "HKCU\binfile" key. See if anything's amiss both before and after installation. Note that the "Lite" installation mode doesn't include 128+ icon subimages only when patching resources to prevent files from going over undefined size limits. There is no need to make the file type icons smaller, you'd only be saving a couple of kilobytes on the final package size.

I've also compiled the "Why did you uninstall" messages. Surprisingly few people who uninstalled wrote anything down. Here's the feedback: Conflicts I had installed over the top of XPize 4.7 beta 2 ! IE7 greyed Back and Forward buttons are a bit too dark It was only test installation, to check features - now I need to install it on clean system :-) Ficou lento e só ví pequenas mudanças no visual. este programa es muy pesado y teniendo un pentium 3 se alenta mucho el pc Momentarily (so I thought) changed the xpize theme back to XP then couldn't figure how to get back to xpize. There is nothing obvious in my start menu nor in the themes to allow me to change back -- seems once you leave zpize it's a one-way trip. Very strange. You'd think you'd make it easy to swap back and forth, but I then I suppose--like most free software--there's always a gotcha or it's years behind the commercial stuff (a la OpenOffice and the Gimp--classic examples of half-done jobs). Shame really, I don't know why you guys make free Open Source software so inaccessible to the average user (well I do really, you geeks just can't put or imagine yourself in the position of the average user). d I was just testing it. I am impressed though. I really LOVED XPize, but it doens't work with my keyboard shortcuts and for me thery're more important than my xp appearance. Hope you solve this problem and I'll certainly install it again! Verlangsamt das System i really do love this programe, but the reason i am uninstalling this is i wanted to try out Aero Ultimate FINAL and i dint want both programs to clash or something Het vertraagt het systeem te veel. It slows down the system. Er is niets veranderd mi sistema no tiene sufiente memoria hace ke mi pc encienda mas lento.... Donot like it very much. de letters zijn slecht te lezen porque no me acaba de convencer del todo lots of programs stopped running like msn 9.1, icon tweaker ng loopt vast Veel te langzaam met op starten en met opstarten van een program Aplic. lijkt cursor tijdens FSX negatief te beinvloeden. Great Stable Program, Boot Screen was a bit strange (no animation). Gave it a shot, saw what I liked, will recommend! freezes after screensaver kicks in. will not come out of standby. I've been using the "Royale Theme" for several months and I truly love its look. I've tried xpize to see if it's going to offer a better a look. However, I still prefer the Royale Theme look. It Sucks! Info in advanced mode installer is wrong, missing, and not complete. C'était juste pour tester, honnêtement, c'est travail très réussi. Je compte le remettre tôt ou tard. porque lo tengo dos veces zit virus in Per cambiare tema ??? non piace il tema Just trying another pack a little cleaner and slimmer more 7ish I don't like the boot screen. traag It seems my system slow's down a bit?! lento To reinstall without the welcome screen (the loading screen has no movement, so if the computer freezes on startup, I can't know as quickly) pesou o pc zz Porque el paquete no contiene las opciones para escoger manualmente los recursos que desee modificar el usuario como lo ha sido con las versiones anteriores de XPize บ่องาม ie 8.0's icons be changed,it's too ugly! 开机太慢～ "Styler" is just f***ed up in this version of xpize... Need to downgrade. Clearly a lot of people think that xpize is just a visual style and don't understand exactly what the program does. I'll need to beef up my "user education" in future. The guy who left the long feedback also left me his email address. I'll get in contact with him. A lot of people also don't like the static bootscreen, a lot also ignore the message in the "first-run" document which explicitly details why their systems will run slow for a few minutes after installation. I guess there's no patch for human stupidity. I think in the "xpize Settings" app I'll remake for 5R7 I'll add an option to enable/disable the bootscreen as that can be changed by altering boot.ini and not changing any resources. BTW, can those who can read the non-English feedback post translations? Thanks!

There's been just under 8,000 installations of xpize 5R6 so far (that sent in installation feedback, there's probably a few thousand more that didn't, it wouldn't surprise me if I was over 10,000 by now). Note this isn't including xpize 5R3, 4, and 5 which have had at least 15,000 installs between them. Anyway, I've processed the feedback sent and made some ugly pie-charts in Excel 2003. Enjoy. Explanations: The first chart shows the "System language" of a user's system, which is the native language of their Windows installation. Unlike your regional settings, this cannot be changed without installing Windows of another language. The second chart shows usage of each translation made for xpize. xpize 5R5 was popular in Brazil, but 5R6 doesn't seem to have taken off, which explains why users of the Brazilian translation account for only 4%. The Farsi language isn't shown because no feedback was sent indicating anyone used it. The Welsh ("cy") translation had 1 user. This shows the proportion of people who used the "Simple Selector" feature rather than using the "Advanced" tree-view to customize their installation. The "null" entry shows the number of people who didn't install xpize via normal means or installs the tools. This chart shows that 7% of users either have System Restore disabled or deselected the option Lite Mode is selected by default on all OSes besides English 1033 Windows. The 29% of users who didn't have lite mode enabled matches the 29% of users running 1033 Windows. Clearly not many people are into experimentation. 23% of users chose not to make a backup. Note this also includes users who installed to a CD image. About 18% of users chose to uninstall xpize after installing it. This is disappointing, but ah well. The % used to be higher: about 25%, but it's going down a bit now so more people are satisfied with xpize. Finally, most users have a dual-core system setup, although single-core users are just behind. I'm a quad-core user and in the minority: only 4%. There's also a handful of people with AMD's tri-core Phenom and even fewer people with 8-core machines (though that could be people with quad-core HT processors, or dual-quad core chips)

Hi Hell Racer, (I'm online because I found a free wifi point, I won't be online fully until I return home next week). Whilst I appreciate the work you've put into your own release, I am concerned that it might easily be confused with an official release from me. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'd be happier if you could modify your installer and associated material (such as the readme file) to clearly mark it as an unofficial release by a third-party fan. I'd also like you to remove or update the <package /> element so the update, feedback, and website attribute URIs are changed so they no-longer refer to my website, since they would conflict. Feel free to use your own website or space to hold the update file, the syntax is simple (compare to the current one on xpize.net), the feedback and website attributes can be removed without any ill-effects. I'm afraid I can't give you any feedback on the changes you've made just yet, since I'm on my laptop without any of my actual xpize files or any VMs to test it in. I'll let you know when I get back home. Sorry about this, and thanks for taking part, 'preciate it

You've chosen a large font size or DPI setting, which is pushing the green arrow off the side behind the blue to the right. Use a smaller font-size or lower DPI setting if you want it back.

The OP is refering to the big (24x24) right-pointing arrow on the XP Start Menu that's gone missing, not the shortcut arrow for *.lnk files. We'll need a screenshot before we can do anything.

Okay, clearly I didn't make the System one long enough. FYI, I disabled the Clock effect (unless you explicitly enable it in Advanced mode) because the AM/PM selector becomes inaccessible. It'll take me a while to fix if I ever do a Release 7. But it isn't like you use those two control panels every day now, is it?

If someone else wants to do it, they're welcome. Don't expect anything until Christmas.

I can't fix this, it's because control panel icons aren't loaded like normal icons. To get a control panel icon Windows needs to load the control panel into memory and ask it what icon to use. The Automatic Updates and Bluetooth panels are only returning information for the 32x32 and 16x16 icons but not 48x48, despite all of the automatic updates files containing a 48x48 icon subimage. Technical details are available here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1299016...cons-windows-xp

The best solution is just to install 5R6 on top of your system and just forget about 4.7. Or format your system. XPize 4.x's uninstaller really isn't that well written. Personally I'd reformat. Or you could experiment if you take a Ghost snapshot of your drive and play around with different orders of uninstallation/installation.

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Deskto\Wallpaper

I didn't have the time to redevelop it, I didn't think it was worth it anyway, since Windows Update doesn't replace GUI-critical files that often. If something's missing just re-run setup again.