Start Menu Button - Change

AClockWorkLemon said:

AClockWorkLemon said:

NO WAY!
That is the problem that i was having with my bitmaps, and indeed I had been re-sizing them using paint.net.
You are a Savior! XD

I take it all back. No matter what I do, I have the problem with the design flahing quickly, then fading away... WTF? any help would be AWSMOE . By-the-by, i still am plagued by the problem of the start orb. it would seem that my start orb is larger than everyone else's, as I have to modify the 66x198 .bmp for any results. Help on this matter would also be greatly appreciated!

Send me the image. I can fix it.

I'm running W7U.

I always keep two user admin accounts on my pc's as a guard against profile corruption and inabiliity to login. It's a thing I learned doing tech support.

I changed my W7U display and system settings from "let Windows decide" to "performance", hoping for a speed increase as my benchmark wasn't gratifying.

This caused the Start Button (SB) to change from an orb to the XP rectangle (XPR) though I didn't know that was the reason. Immediately I started searching, thinking I had done something, for the start button wanting to put the orb back in place. I used the tutorial above as a guide in my search. I also used the trial version of Restorator. I searched the C:\windows\explorer.exe expecting to find my XPR's. They weren't there.

Not finding my start button in C:\windows\explorer.exe caused me to do some further research. I searched the registry, I used Autoruns attempting to monitor changes in the start button. I wasn't clever enough to find the start button in the registry, but I'm certain it could be found using the MSDN.

Anyway I have observed that the orb is only present when using an Aero display theme. Changing to a non-Aero theme changes the SB to an XPR. The actual flag is probably more subtle than the Aero theme itself, being an element common amongst Aero themes.

The SB will be directly affected by shifting display settings from "Windows best" to "performance" OR by changing from an Aero theme to a non-Aero theme.

Additionally while my login was set for performance (XPR button), I changed to user2 which still had default settings. User2 had an orb SB.

Consider that user1 has an XPR while at the same time user2 has an orb. Therefore I think the true location of the orb is not in c:\windows\explorer.exe - recreating that program for every login isn't reasonable.

Storing the SB in the user profile based on current system settings and for use in creation of a user's system task bar would make sense. In a server environment the usage of custom orbs within a roaming profile would prevent the item from being machine dependent.

After benchmarking my system again while in "performance" mode and getting the same "pitiful" result, I restored the use of an Aero theme and have lost interest in the orb.

If someone could parse the user profile, I think the orb would be there.

Is there a way to change the button in the Classic theme?

Thanks Mate,

My apologies if this has been asked already, but when using the Start Orb Changer, do you still need to take ownership of the entire Windows folder? I have taken ownership of explorer.exe (I was trying to change the orb the other night, no luck though), but this is the first tutorial I've seen suggest taking ownership of the entire folder...

tw33k said:

When using Start Orb Changer there's no need to take ownership. Just run it as administrator.

Awesome, that definitely makes things dead simple then. Thanks for the reply.

I decided I'd try make my own orb last night, and came up with a pretty decent one, but I have one small problem that I can't figure out. The orb applies perfectly to my taskbar, no issues with size, but when I move the mouse pointer over and back off again, it flashes a black block first and then the image. It only happens between it's passive and rollover states though, if I open the start menu with my keyboard the button changes to the third in the sequence without any black flash.

I noticed that the custom orbs that I downloaded (from here and in the zip file with the changer app) all had a black background, and mine has the same. I created this from a new doc in CS3, so there's no issue with converting from one format to another, and I never had any transparency to begin with.

Could somebody please have a look at see if they could tell me what went wrong? The bitmap is in the attached RAR file.

gladson1976 said:

The black box on hover occurs because of a incorrect Alpha channel in the bitmap.
Try this,
[HOW TO]Preserve Alpha Channel for Start Orb BMP's

Thanks, I'll try that.