Thanks for that.  That will save a lot of time.

I had some serious life come up in the last few days, but I'll be returning to the this theme stuff when things settle down and will refer back to this for reference and do some experimenting.

7-Zip is one program that still uses them.  Just the up one level icon next to the path.  The rest of the toolbar icons are changeable in the exe.

There's a few other random ones, some of them are very old yeah.  The one with the dodgy alpha bitmaps was pre 2011 I think, I don't use it.. so I just deleted it.  Like you said, most programs don't use these anymore.

I'm new here so I haven't had a chance to read around much yet.  I just wanted to put this out there because it's bugged me for a while.

I've used a theme made by someone else for a few years but wondered if I could tweak certain things.  That's why I bought Vista Style Builder to tweak some things.

The thing I'm looking to change is the size of the min/max/close buttons  (and also make custom ones).  Relative to DPI.  But from what I've read so far, it's hard to change that via msstyles.  I found a registry setting and a tool that can change the close button, but not all 3.

The main thing though.. is the transparent glass effect in the main explorer path window.  Currently with the theme I have, it matches the title window background glass.  Trying different themes it seems like it's hard coded into explorer.exe (or something).  I just wanted to confirm this though.  Is there any way to seperate it so that it can be like this?

https://i.imgur.com/x9euNPP.jpg

It's sort of similar to what Windows 10 does, but would this remove the glass effect?  So it's either this and no glass, or is there a way to preserve the glass effect for the outside of windows, but have this effect?

Also, where is the location of the files in Vista Style Builder that apply to this area?

Amazing!  Thanks for that!

I've had so much trouble locating these over the years, or even finding it being talked about in terms of knowing what to search for.

When I searched my Windows 7 system, there was 24 different files in that folder (and the sub folders).  Four different versions (sizes).  I ended up doing a .res file and using Resource Hacker to patch them all at the same time with a script.  But once you find the names of the right ones and write them down it's not so hard, even if you wanted to do them one by one.  I imagine these probably change with every major Windows update.   So Windows 10 for example, they'd need updating over time.

There's also the amd64 version and x86 version to worry about.  The main annoying thing about that folder is how they are named, but using search and search by type *.*.dll worked pretty well.

There was an older program from 2007 where the new icons worked but the alpha layer was black, and showing through on the background.  Is that likely a problem with the program itself in terms of the way it was coded?  I was thinking to fix that, I could colour the background and use 24bit bitmaps, but for now I'd prefer to keep the alpha layer so that they work properly with different coloured Windows themes.  My current toolbar background is 244, 244, 244 and it would look worse if that ever changed.  I rarely use that program anyway.  I was just wondering if there was anything I could have done wrong in terms of making the bmps?  Because they work fine for all of the modern programs.

It's bugged me for so long and now I can finally change them.  Thanks a lot for your fast helpful response.  Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I just wanted to confirm that everything works.. and I replaced all of the bmps, not just 124 and 130.  So it took some time as I had to create some icons from scratch.  It's a pain to change those files since they float around in different folders, so I figured I'll do them all at once.  The results were great!  Thanks again.

From the Style builder guide PDF that's floating around online..

https://i.imgur.com/PTCgHle.jpeg

The icons that I am talking about, are the folder icons located between 5 and 6.  The go up one level and create new folder icon.

Is it possible for Style Builder to edit them?  I'm looking at editing both for Windows 7 and Windows 10 styles.  I understand if they aren't in the msstyles file.. because I have had no luck finding them but does anyone know where else they might be?  In terms of the exe or dll?  There's also a favourite icon that shows up from time to time as well (a yellow folder icon with a star inside of it).