How to Change the Animation Background Color in Windows Vista Progress Dialog Box?

Microsoft has changed the method of showing animation in Windows Vista Explorer. Now Windows Vista uses pre-defined set of color codes to show animation background color in progress dialog box instead of a built-in AVI Clip as it used to be in previous Windows versions such as Windows XP.

Today in this tutorial, we are going to share a method to change colors of animation which is displayed in progress dialog box while copying, moving, deleting files or applying attributes to a file.

Requirements:

• Resource Hacker
• Text editor such as Notepad

Instructions:

1. First take ownership of %windir%\System32\Shell32.dll file and then open it in Resource Hacker. Now extract the text file shell32.dll/UIFILE/42.txt.

Note: here %windir% represents “Windows” directory which can be found in the system drive where Windows is installed. In most of the cases its C:\Windows.

2. Now edit the text file in a text editor such as Notepad and press Ctrl+F to open find dialog box. Now search for background=”Gradient

3. You’ll get following line of code:

Here argb(X,R,G,B) represents:

X -> Transparency
R -> Red
G -> Green
B -> Blue

4. Now you can replace the existing color code with your desired color code such as following one:

After making changes, save the text file and exit.

5. Now replace the original text file present in shell32.dll file with this new modified text file using Resource Hacker.

6. Now save the file at some other location, for example in D: drive.

7. Rename original “Shell32.dll” file present in “System32” folder to “shell32_backup.dll“.

8. Now copy your new modified “shell32.dll” file to “System32” folder.

9. Restart your system and after restart Windows will start using your new modified file and you’ll see new animation in progress dialog box.

This tutorial was written by our friend Ramesh Kumar who wanted to share it with us…