Themes location

Where are the Themes for the desktop settings in XP Home SP 2 supposed
to be kept? I have made a couple of themes, and the dialog box
defaults to my documents as where to save them. I want to save them
with the rest of the themes and have them all in the same place and
all show up in my Desktop options.

Thanks!


Awaiting your responses with baited breath, I remain, yours truly,

<*(((><

"<*(((><" <Fishy.RemoveThis@Ocean.Net> wrote in message
> Where are the Themes for the desktop settings in XP Home SP 2 supposed
> to be kept? I have made a couple of themes, and the dialog box
> defaults to my documents as where to save them. I want to save them
> with the rest of the themes and have them all in the same place and
> all show up in my Desktop options.



Do you mean the themes listed in the droplist next to the Save As button?

I was wondering about that myself a while back and did some tests to find out where they're stored. Unfortunately they are not,
well not the way you expect. I thought maybe there is a registry entry or something that points to the directory(ies) where theme
files are stored but there is not.

That list is populated by looking for theme files (*.theme) first in "\Windows\Resources\Themes", then in any and ALL folders in the
first level of "My Documents". What that means is that when you open the Display Properties dialog box, it will look for any file
with "theme" as the extension in "My Documents" and every single folder in "My Documents" (whether they contain pictures, music,
text, whatever) but only in the folders themselves, not subfolders.

So, what you can do is to make sure that none of the folders in your "My Documents" have have .theme files in them-you can have them
in folders in folders in "My Documents", but not in the first or second levels-and then just put all of your theme files in a single
folder in My Documents.

Here's an example layout of what you can do:

My Documents - no theme files
My Documents\Music - no theme files
My Documents\Pictures - no theme files
My Documents\Text - no theme files
My Documents\Foo - no theme files
My Documents\Foo\Bar - optional theme files
My Documents\Baz - no theme files
My Documents\Themes - theme files

This way, only the files listed in "\Windows\Resources\Themes" and the ones in "My Documents\Themes" will be listed, nice and
organized.


HTH

--
Alec S.
news/alec->synetech/cjb/net