Most of us use custom 3rd party themes in Windows XP to change its look. But if you also use Office 2003 in Windows XP, you might have noticed that these custom themes remove the default blue toolbar color in Office 2003 applications and you get the classic grey color instead.
This tutorial will help you in getting back the blue toolbar back in Office 2003 under Windows XP:
Problem Reason:
Actually Office 2003 checks whether you are using default "Luna" theme or not. If it finds that you are using any other theme, it starts showing the ugly classic toolbar.
Solution:
The only work around for this problem is to rename your 3rd party windows theme's msstyles file to "luna.msstyles", e.g., if you are using our "VistaVG" theme, then just rename the "VistaVG.msstyles" to "luna.msstyles". That's it.
The .msstyles file can be found in "Windows\Resources\Themes\custom_theme_name\" folder.
For WindowBlinds users, open "%windir%\wb.ini" file and add MakeOfficeBlue=1 in [global] section. You can change 1 to 2 or 3 to change the color to Green and Silver respectively.
Posted by: Vishal Gupta | Categories: Microsoft Office, Troubleshooting, Windows XP
Eric Shields
I'm sorry if this is off-OS, but I'm running Windows 8 and I wish for the opposite effect and more for my MS Office 2003. I want it to be able to change colors automatically with Aero's title border. It did this fine under XP. I would like to know if this is possible, still. (I hope it is) Please help me-it's driving me up a wall and down again! I am proceeding to take your other advice as I type this comment. Thank you.