There is a single file used by Windows XP that prevents you from using third-party visual styles (those lacking a digital signature from Microsoft.) This file is uxtheme.dll.

Products that work around this limitation like StyleXP and WindowBlinds have made their authors rich as thousands of Windows users worldwide have embraced their skinning products. However, each of these products have run *on top* of the Windows operating system. That’s not neccessarily bad, but system tweakers don’t like that approach.

Well you can uninstall all of that junk, because the Neowin UXTheme Multi-Patcher v1.5 makes them irrelevant. It’ll patch uxtheme.dll in mere seconds to allow unsigned visual styles to work with Windows – no extra software required. It’ll even un-patch the .dll if you’d like it to.

EDIT: Not working? Run the patcher in safe mode. That’ll fix it for sure.