Changing That Green XP Start Button

Here's all the best information I could gather on changing the look and feel of the Windows XP non-classic start button. You know, that annoyingly green button on your side bar. I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a program that you can simply run to do this all for you. But these instructions are all "do-it-yourself"... meaning you'll be playing with the registry and system resources. I think it's pretty fun, pretty simple, and gives you a better idea of how Windows works. Have fun and say goodbye to your bright green start button! And good luck trying to think of something better to put there, I just got replaced the button with a line and an all black windows logo icon. And that's all I have to say.

Changing the color of the start button

Changing the text and image on the start button

- Image Replacement tips from Yuki (above link) -

I would like to comment about the shape of the start button icon.

There are some examples of customized start button icon in the web; they all are rectangular in shape. But you notice that Windows default flag icon is not such a shape and it "blends" to the start button.

This blending is produced by an "alpha channel" in the default bitmap image. To see it, open the bitmap in the explorer.exe with ResHacker, choose "Action -> Save(S) [Bitmap : 143 : 10xx]...", and save it as .bmp file. Then you can open it with an image processing program such as Photoshop and see the alpha channel in the channel palette. You can not see it by simple copy and paste from ResHacker to Photoshop.

Alpha channel is a grayscale image hidden in the file that indicates the "opaqueness" of the entire image. White means complete opaque, black means transparent and gray indicates semi-transparent with its darkness.

You can create your own image with an alpha channel like the original. Don't forget to check the "Include alpha channel" checkbox in save dialog of Photoshop. Save your own, replace it with original bitmap in explore.exe and you can have your beautifully "blended", custom shaped start button icon.

The size of default icon is 25 pixels in width and 20 pixels in height for "Luna" theme (ID=143), but you may notice a complete black (transparent) region of 5 pixels width at the rightmost of the image. Apparently, this region is intended to make a space between the icon and the following text. So if you make an icon with no margin (or no alpha channel), the icon sticks to the text. This is not beautiful, of course. So the default size of Luna theme icon can be explained as 20 * 20 pixels with 5 pixels space. Curiously, the default icon for "Classic" theme (ID=176) is 16 * 16 pixels, without any space. Luna theme can be space-consuming. This is probably for considering generalization of wide-screen. The size of icon is not restricted to 25 * 20, so you can create smaller icon instead.

By the way, I think it is dangerous to overwrite explorer.exe without testing. You can test it by Ctrl-Alt-Delete, quit explorer.exe, run your own such as C:\WINDOWS\explorer2.exe as a new task, and see it.

You can rename explorer.exe while it is running. So you can easily rename explorer.exe in simple safe mode with explorer. Command prompt is not necessary. Safe mode is necessary to bypass system file protection. Go to C:\WINDOWS in safe mode, rename explorer.exe to explorer_orig.exe , rename your explorer2.exe to explorer.exe and restart the PC.