Applying Themes To Your Windows Vista Sidebar

The look of the Windows Vista Sidebar is a little drab, and there's no way to customize it with the default tools in Vista. Thankfully third party developers have stepped up to the plate and created an application that will let you re-theme the sidebar.

Note: After installing and launching this application you will need to restart the Vista sidebar.

When you launch the Windows Sidebar Styler application, it will give you this dialog that gives you a list of all the elements in the theme. You can select the items and see a preview on the right.

The big Play button will apply the style, but first you'll need to load it by clicking the button to the right for "Load a Windows Sidebar Style", which will open up a file selection dialog so you can choose from the different themes.

There's a bunch of themes that come with the application, or you can find more themes at the WinCustomize gallery.

If you click the More button on the dialog, you can even select an option to make the sidebar resizable.

Once you select that option, you can resize the sidebar like any other window. You'll notice a new option to "Lock" the sidebar, which will prevent resizing once you've chosen the size that you want.

Another benefit to this tool is that you can load more powerful gadgets utilizing WPF (Windows Presentation Framework).

Download Windows Sidebar Styler from stoyanoff.info

Why Did Windows Vista's Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?

I've been getting emails left and right from readers complaining that their Music folder icon has turned from the default shiny icon into the generic yellow folder icon. After doing some research I finally have a workaround for this issue.

In Windows, all folders can be customized with whatever icon you want. All you need to do is put a hidden file named desktop.ini into the root of that folder, which tells Windows extra information for the folder including what icon to use.

The problem that people are experiencing is due to the contents of that file being modified somehow and pointing to the wrong icon, as you can see here:

You can normally fix this problem by right-clicking on the folder and choosing properties, and then on the Customize tab you'll see this:

If that section does not exist, however, we'll need to open up that desktop.ini file by pasting the following command into the start menu search or run box:

notepad %USERPROFILE%\music\desktop.ini

You'll see a file that should look exactly like this, but probably does not.

You can usually just replace the contents of that file with the following text:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21790
InfoTip=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-12689
IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-108
IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll
IconIndex=-237

Save the file and log off from Windows, and then login again. Your Music folder icon should now look like this:

Hopefully this solves the problem for you!

Update: If you are looking for a folder besides the Music folder, I've created a list of the default settings for every user profile folder.