How Themes are Stored

Themes are stored as theme files with the extension *.theme. If you do a search for *.theme using the Windows search feature, your results produce two themes: Luna and Windows Classic (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. The Luna and Windows Classic theme files are stored in the C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes folder.

These two themes are stored in the C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes folder. As discussed in Chapter 2, "Basic Windows XP Interface Modifications," a theme is a set of different elements such as colors, a background, icons, screen fonts, mouse pointers, and a sound scheme. So, it would follow that each of these themesLuna and Windows Classicwould have a default set of elements that give the theme itself a particular custom look.

Other themes, such as those you create yourself (discussed in the next chapter) or those you download from the Web, obviously have their own settings for the elements that make up a theme. And you can change the various settings that control the elements that make up the Luna (Windows XP), Windows Classic, or other Windows XP themes.

Before we cover modifying some of the elements that make up a theme (something we look at briefly in this chapter but in more detail in Chapter 4, "Creating Windows XP Themes from Scratch"), let's see how you access the various elements that make up a particular theme. Because it is the default theme, we'll start with the various interface settings of the Luna theme.