Windows Explorer navigation pane background colour changing

Greetings,

First of all, I'm a complete noob at customizing, so please bear with me.

I've been searching for a way to change the Windows Explorer navigation (folder) pane background colour, the panel that (by default) can be found on the left and shows things like Favourites, Libraries etc. The default colour is white, and lately it has started to hurt my eyes more and faster than it did before. That's why I would like to change it to grey.
I've 'already' managed to do this for the reading pane by editing the shellstyle.dll file (C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Aero\Shell\NormalColor), but I cannot find any information on how to do this for the navigation pane. That is, I found some topics but most of the time the answers point towards downloading/buying a program that can do it, or needing to send some files to a helpful person who can change it him/herself, and by doing so probably avoid a lot of explaining, which of course I can understand. However, I would like to do this myself so that in the future I'll no longer have to rely on someone else to change that colour. Furthermore, I'm not interested in any other scheme than the standard Aero (yet...) so I would like to do this without downloading/buying any program (which I'll most likely never use again after I changed that one colour - but you never know, of course).

So, where can I find the code for the background colour? Can it be found in the shellstyle.dll file as well? Do I need to look somewhere else? It doesn't seem likely to me that it (the background) is an image I need to edit, as it is just one, simple colour with no special 'effects' (unlike the one of, for example, the Control Panel). I could be wrong, though.

In any case, I found this: How to change left pane BG in start menu and all folders in which the member Bongo says: "The backgrounds for the Windows Explorer on the left side and the main window are fill colors and the only way I know how to change that is to use Ave's Windows7 Style Builder", but also: "The images on the left side of the control panel are different than the areas in the Windows Explorer, for the control panel they are in the shell32.dll and the fill color for the Windows Explorer navigation pane and main area are in the .msstyles". I find that odd, as I (as previously said) changed the main area background colour via shellstyle.dll... Also, I find it unlikely that Bongo (who appears in many threads about this subject and seems to know a lot about it) knows not how to change the Windows Explorer main window background colour, while I do. That's not meant to criticize Bongo, but rather that I suppose he made a typing error there, which still leaves room for me to hope for an answer to my question.

Also found:
https://www.sevenforums.com/customiza...tion-pane.html (never answered...)

Customizing the left Folder Panel and Folder Background. How? (not useful, as that is about images and points towards Ave's Windows7 Style Builder, which I want to avoid)

Can anyone help me? Surely there has to be someone around to know how to do this by hand, i.e. by not using any program?

(Sorry for the wall of text. TLDR; how can I change the Windows explorer navigation pane background colour without using any program, i.e. what file(s) to edit and how?)

Hi.
You may want to try this: https://www.sevenforums.com/customiza...nd-change.html
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(Later edit)
It worked nicely for me, though I had to install UxStyle ( http://uxstyle.com/ ).

Just for the sake of clarity, here's the step by step procedure.

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Tip: in order to avoid the annoying popups asking you whether you want to use your administrator privileges in order to accomplish various tasks such as copying, renaming or moving system files, you could run task manager, go to processes, press "Show processes from all users", kill explorer.exe, press File > New task, write "explorer.exe" and check the "Create this task with administrative privileges" box. Now you're running explorer as administrator.
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1. Go to %systemroot%\Resources\Themes
2. Make a copy of aero.theme (assuming that's what you currently use), and rename it as you wish. For example: darkexplorer.theme
3. Make a copy of the Aero folder. Just for the sake of organization, name it similar to your theme (In my example's case, DarkExplorer)
4. Inside the DarkExplorer folder, rename the aero.msstyles file to darkexplorer.msstyles
5. Open darkexplorer.theme with a text editor (you'll probably need running as administrator). You will notice an ini format. Amongst the first lines, there should be something like

Code:

DisplayName=@%SystemRoot%\System32\themeui.dll,-2013

Delete whatever goes after the = sign, and write your theme name instead. This will be the name displayed in Control Panel. No quotes are necessary.
Then, search for the [VisualStyles] section. There should be a property named "Path", leading to a .msstyles files. Change it so that it leads to your own msstyles file.
6. Now we're getting to the serious stuff. Hack into the resources of darkexplorer.msstyles using whatever resource editor you'd like.
7. Find the VARIANT resource type, and open the only resource named NORMAL.
8. If your res editor can't edit hex directly, you may need to export the resource as a file and open it in a hex editor.
9. Go to the hex offset of 0x2C188 and see if the bytes at that offset are "FC FC FC". If not, try 0x2C1E0. In case you still don't find the FC FC FC sequence, do a little search for it. The last occurence of FC FC FC in the file should be what you are looking for.
10. Replace the FC three bytes with the RGB value of your desired color.
11. Save. (If you used an external editor, replace the resource with your modified file)
12. Go to Control Panel > Themes and select your shiny new theme. Open a folder in explorer to check for results.
13. If the Aero look is disabled upon changing the theme, you might need UxStyle on your system. (sorry :P - I hate third party tools too but I just couldn't get around this one)
14. Enjoy your hack!

Hope this helps.


[EDIT]
Whoops, you posted while I was writing this. For post #5, here it goes:
To extract 1033 resource as a file in ResHacker, open it, then right click on the icon and choose Save [VARIANT : NORMAL : 1033]... Save [VARIANT] resources... - after which you can remove the generated .rc file and make your edits on the bin.
Read what I've previously wrote about the offset. They aren't always the same on different systems. I noticed that on my machine, offsets are the ones in that topic plus 0x58. Safest bet is searching and replacing. There should be only 5 occurrences of FCFCFC in the resource.
Don't hex edit the whole msstyles.

[EDIT 2] ...and to replace the resource after you've done editing, go to Actions > Replace other resource..., then select your file, and manually write VARIANT and NORMAL in the resource type and name fields.

[EDIT 3] Don't worry about what start offsets ResHacker gives to your resources.
And for a clarification: The offset values that are described in Six9siX's tutorial and here are NOT the ones ResHacker shows you. Those offsets assume that your resource starts at 0x00000000.

[EDIT] Wait. I think I made a mistake. I told you how to save the hex dump of the resource instead of the actual resource, and when you replaced the resource in the file, you actually replaced it with the altered hex dump of itself. I'm terribly sorry. What I should have told you to do when exporting the resource is:
Right click on it and press "save [VARIANT] resources". Two files will be generated: a .rc file that you can ignore (delete), and the actual resource file (ResHacker will name that Data_1.bin or something similar). Edit that, and you'll probably find the proper offsets.
Sorry about that.