Wuuuw.... *excited*

puh in time i still can upgrade...

The skin definition fixes just mean some errors were corrected.

The high contrast fix is just a warning telling the user of a problem if they set the OS system colour for button face (not text) to pure white as this triggers office into a compatibility mode.

so, download the file, double click on the exe and let it do it's thing, does this work?

WB will apply .themepacks if that is what you mean. Just go to Windows Aero and select one from the substyles tab. You can even apply textures to them.

I think he meant "Visual Styles" or msstyles skins. But, could be wrong.

The way I understood that, the porting utility stopped working with OS's after XP.

okay, I just started looking at the new sks and noticed a few things that I thought I might mention.

the default skin, diamond, has been created with substyles already in place, It's pretty easy to delete those substyles that are unwanted but generally aren't substyles created after the main blind has been created to maintain margins and settings. now one would have to go a change all the settings and margins twice again.

I've only just looked at the edit start menu page there appears to be additional graphics not encountered being in place with the previous version. the 'search mode' graphic has been usually taken from the 'edit vista/7 explorer parts', not the start menu as there were some issues using this graphic. sorry, don't remember what.

also the bottom bar is now broken into a right and left graphic instead of one solid graphic. this appears to be a vista option.

the 'expanded start menu' is now a default graphic. one may not choose to use this option.

I guess I need to create a template from the diamond default blind to remove substyles and unwanted graphics before making another blind. I realize that I can just delete those graphics not wanted but I think that maybe the developers attempting to help have made the program more difficult to work with.

and it would have nice to update those "examples" to make them examples of what actually the graphic was suppose to represent. I guess a beta for feedback would have also been a consideration not employed.

@ Neil is there a way to define the size of  perpixel frames with a value- iam asking this since some applications seem to have a lower value and can therefore be shrunkn to almost the rollup state with a width of 50 like skinstudio itself.
Most skins with a little bit creativity in windowframes will be cut off or the margins settings will be scaled and the whole look will change when the window gets reduced  to that 50x20 size.
So i was thinking maybe just maybee there is a way to build something into sks to define that size by a value? Or maybee WB itself like the per application setting ?
I just want to know if that is possible or not- thanks in advance btw ty for the early update on SKS

When is the Start Menu not working right for you?

some other things I seem to be encountering:

Edit vista/7 explorer parts - search field background There are generally two sequences of graphics (normal-pressed-disabled-mouseover) and (normal-mouseover-pressed-disabled). The sequence for this graphic is (normal-mouseover-disabled-selected) which would appear to be incorrect except that it would also appear that there is only one of the views that work anyhow. In other words; you may reduce the graphic count to 1 with no apparent impact.

Mouseover text for start menu (left and right) doesn't seem to want to change from the normal text color. In other words; changing the mouseover text color doesn't change the color.

Painting per pixel frames: "stretch middle section" option doesn't appear to work. Left and right borders seem to need "tile horz middle section" and top and bottom borders need "stretch horz middle section" to work properly.

gotta disagree with that Tom, metalworks, graphite blue and gunmetal glass are just three of my blinds that have different colored text for normal and mouseover???

I believe Lightstar posted (in the distant past - 2009) that it still worked for XP but that for Vista and W7 you would have to make additional adjustments in SKS. The last version of SKS which used that utility was SKS5.

Here's a link to the utility. I don't believe there are any plans to update it... but I guess you could pm someone in support@stardock.com to ask...

https://www.stardock.com/products/skinstudio/MSImport.zip