Replacing the Windows XP Start Button Background - Locating the start button background.
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In Resource Hacker, choose File > Open… and navigate to the %systemroot% directory. In most cases this is C:Windows. In Windows 2000 upgrades this may be C:Winnt instead.
In the Windows directory, navigate into the Resources folder and then into Themes. Here you should see a folder for each of your installed themes. Navigate into the folder for your current theme. On a default install, this is the Luna folder.
Open the file named luna.msstyles. This is a Windows Visual Style file. It’s actually a dll file with a renamed extension. It contains graphics, CSS, and text strings associated with the Luna theme.
In the left Resource Hacker pane, expand the Bitmaps section and navigate to the BLUE_STARTBUTTON_BMP heading. Expand that and then choose the listing for your currently installed language. For US-EN this is 1033.
If you are not using Luna’s default Blue color set, find the graphic for your color set instead. The Olive Green color set uses HOMESTEAD_STARTBUTTON_BMP and the silver color set uses METALLIC_STARTBUTTON_BMP.
You should now see your start button’s background graphic in the right-hand pane. Let’s save a backup of that now. It will also give us a template to work with when producing our own graphic later.
From the Action menu choose Save [Bitmap : BLUE_STARTBUTTON_BMP : 1033]…, give it a name like original_startbutton.bmp, and save it to your desktop. Close Resource Hacker when you’re finished and we’ll take a look at editing this graphic.
Next: Preparing the new graphic. >>
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