Themes and Schemes in Vista

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In this fifth part of a six-part series on personalizing Windows Vista, you'll learn how to disable themes, how to use Vista's color scheme, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter four of Windows Vista Administration: The Definitive Guide, written by Brian Culp (O'Reilly; ISBN: 0596529597). Copyright © 2006 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media.

Deleting a theme

We’ve spent quite a bit of time here discussing how to customize the Vista desktop appearance and then save those changes as a theme. But what if you want to delete a theme? It takes only a few steps:

1. Open the Personalization Control Panel application (right-click an open area of the desktop and choose Personalize), and then choose the Theme link.
   
2. From the Theme Settings dialog box, select the theme you’ve slated for deletion in the drop-down menu and click the Delete button. Vista removes the theme definition file and all related media that may be associated with the custom theme.

Theme files, by the way, are stored in the %WinDir%\Resources\Themes folder by default, but you shouldn’t delete theme files manually. Use the steps just outlined instead.

Disabling Theme Changes

Sometimes themes can be the bane of an administrator’s existence. Users end up losing icons and can’t figure out how else to launch favorite applications, or they change the wallpaper to something that’s, shall we say, less than business-appropriate, and so on. Inevitably, they end up calling you over to set things back to the way they were—a loss of productivity, to say the least.

Fortunately, there’s a way to enforce that a particular theme be used. More specifically, there’s a way to prevent changes to any part of the Vista desktop so that whatever settings have been configured for the user will remain unaltered.

The technology answer here is to use a GPO, and configure a policy setting that prevents any desktop changes. Here’s the procedure to follow:

1. Open the Microsoft Management Console by typing mmc from the Start menu. You will be prompted to continue if you’re using User Account Control.
   
2. A blank MMC console opens. This console has zero functionality right now, but it will be functional once we add a snap-in. To do so, click File -> Add/Remove Snap in.
   
3. The Add or Remove Snap-ins dialog box appears, as seen in Figure 4-23. From the list, choose the Group Policy Object Editor and then click the Add button (in the middle) to snap it into the blank console.

Figure 4-23.  Choosing the right tool for the job

You’re now asked to which object the GPO will be linked. In a Windows server domain environment, you can link GPOs to domains, sites, and organizational units (OUs). To manage a single computer, choose to link the GPO to just the Local Computer where the setting will apply. If your Vista computer is not part of a domain, you’ll only get one choice: the Local computer.

Now the MMC console appears with a snap-in loaded called Local Computer Policy. There are two main groups of policy settings here:

Computer settings

These settings configure computer behavior, such as startup and shutdown activity.

User settings

These control user behavior, such as actions at logon and logoff time.

As you might imagine, there can be a lot of overlap when configuring settings for a particular desired behavior.

There are hundreds of possible Group Policy settings (and that’s just for the Local computer; never mind ones available in a Windows server domain), so we’ll focus here on just the desired result: preventing user changes to the desktop. To do so:

1. Expand the Group Policy by selecting User Settings -> Administrative Templates -> Desktop -> Desktop.
   
2. Here you see just a few of the possible desktop settings that could affect user behavior. (And not to beat a dead horse here, but these are just the desktop settings in the Desktop folder. Look at the taskbar and Start menu settings if you really want to start feeling overwhelmed.)
   
3. Note that none of these settings is configured by default. To prevent changes to the Desktop theme (that is what kicked off all this discussion, recall), double-click the “Prohibit changes” setting.
   
4. In the “Prohibit changes Properties” dialog box, click the Enabled radio button, as shown in Figure 4-24.
   

5. Now, click OK. The setting should be enabled in the Group Policy Object Editor MMC console.

If you’re wondering whether the Group Policies can apply to one user but not another user, the answer is yes. If you’re waiting for me to tell you how, you’ll have to look ahead to Chapter 12.

Figure 4-24.  Prohibit changes to the desktop with a GPO

Next: Disabling themes, Part two >>
 

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