Get Longhorn Style 3D Animated (Rotating) User Picture in Windows Vista Start Menu

Who doesn’t know about “Longhorn“? Longhorn was the initial codename of Windows Vista testing builds. When Windows Vista was under development, Microsoft used the codename “Longhorn” for alpha and beta builds. Longhorn builds were full of eye candy stuff. There was awesome animation included in login screen (welcome screen), boot screen, shellstyle (details pane or common tasks) in Windows Explorer, user picture in Start Menu and many other places.

Longhorn UI was great and every Windows user was waiting for the final build to use but suddenly Microsoft dropped the whole project. Actually all eye candy stuff and animations caused huge increase in the source code and many other problems which were very hard to fix, so Microsoft ditched Longhorn project and started working on a fresh code which formed today’s Windows Vista.

Since when Microsoft abandoned Longhorn project, all Longhorn lovers are trying to create themes and GUI modifications for Windows Vista and Windows 7 to mimic Longhorn UI.

In the old longhorn 4xxx days, the Start Menu user picture was more animated and actually used to rotate when you had the start menu opened.

Today in this topic, we are going to share a free utility which brings back the same feature in Windows Vista.

“3D User Picture” is a free and portable tool created by our friend Andreas Verhoeven which tries to achieve Longhorn style effect in Windows Vista start menu user pic.

Following screenshot shows how the user picture rotates when you open start menu:

You can download it using following link:

Download Link