Windows 98 Themes

[Lord J]

I have an old computer in addition to my laptop.  I've recently been adding to (and taking away from) the 233mghz, 32mb ram, Windows 98 peice of computing... well... you get the idea.  Anyway, I had gotten it to run pretty well for its specs, and I was feeling really good about it.  So while my mom was on my laptop I decided to try and change the look of it.  I went to Display Properties and started messing with the colors of the taskbar etc.  Whenever I would click on Apply, though, the computer would simply show the busy cursor and nothing happened.  However, I noticed that if I changed certain facets of the scheme and "Applied" then ctrl-alt-deleted the Display Properties screen off, those facets would remain.  So I took a dramatic step.  I changed the theme, then shut down the computer to make the changes stick.  Right before it turned off, the taskbar turned the color I desired.

That's when it all screwed up.

When I restarted the computer, everything loaded up, but when the background loaded an error screen popped up and said that Explorer had commited one of those infamous "illegal operations."  That's right, Explorer.  After that, the only thing the computer does is show the background that I put on it years ago.  No taskbar, no icons, no right-click menus.  Alt-ctrl-del works, but it only shows Rnaap as a running process.  Safe mode does the same thing, but DOS Command Prompt runs pretty well.  I'm probably going to keep working with DOS and Windows to try and make it all work.  Oh yeah, and the Windows 98 startup disk doesn't work either, the computer doesn't try to boot up through the A: drive before going through C:.

[gryphon]

sounds familliar. . .

doesn't it have something to do with active desktop ?

In Windows 98 you can easy reset your theme settings in the registry if things still look wrong.

[Lord J]

Hmmm... Ok, I'll see what I can do.