Hacking (well customizing really) XP...

[kimangroo]

Hi people,

I'm not a cracker/hacker and don't know if my question is appropriate in these forums or not, but it seems like you guys know your stuff so maybe someone out there can help me...

I have been customizing my XP desktop and the Welcome Screen in nice dark colors, however I haven't been able to get rid of this default blue background color that always appears just before the welcome screen loads, either when booting or when switching user. The effect looks really bad and kind of ruins the point of customizing in the first place.

I have found a number of other threads about this and have asked on a number of forums but although there have been plenty of possible answers, none of them have worked.

http://www.msfn.org/board/Change-Post-logon-Screen-Color-t9482.html

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=254332&st=0&p=589144126&#entry589144126

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=341580&st=0&p=589144052&#entry589144052

I have tried all the solutions suggested and changed lots of registry keys without success.

So then I decided the blue color might be coming from somewhere a little deeper in XP's innards and looked first for bitmaps and then hex codes in ntoskrnl.exe, logonui.exe, winlogon.exe, msgina.dll etc... No luck. Problem is I don't know the exact value of this blue color (seems to my eye to be around rgb 80 110 200) and MS hid the color palette for the boot logo backwards, so I have wasted hours searching these files for all sorts of hex combinations, but no luck!


That's when I thought maybe my problem was leaving the customizing world and entering the hacking one and so I decided to ask here:

Do any of you XP experts know where MS might have hidden the settings for this color? ntoskrnl.exe? winlogon.exe? anywhere else?

Again sorry if this question isn't appropriate but I was hoping some of you might see it as a challenge?!!

Right now, instead of wanting to get rid of the blue color, I just really really want to know where the hell MS has hidden the setting!

Thanks for your time.

[detten]

I don't exactly know what you mean since I don't have XP (or any windows version for that matter), but I think that searching for approximate RGB values with a hexeditor is not a good approach :S

http://www.reversing.be/article.php?story=20061209171938444

This link shows where the bootlogo is stored, and how the color palette is shifted. Perhaps this might give you some new ideas? Perhaps someone else can give some more meaningful advice

[kimangroo]

Thanks for your reply Detten, yeah I was hoping on striking really lucky with my hex editor approach!

Actually the tutorial you posted was how I found this site and decided to register. I'll have another read through anyway and see if I can't come up with something.

In the meantime if anyone else has any ideas, I'm all ears!