Some time ago Microsoft launched Royale Theme for Windows XP, a slick, elegant blueish theme that many people adopted immediately. A new Royale theme appeared after that, this time in a very elegant black. However, this dark Royale was apparently not finished and you could tell it clearly needed some polishing. The same happened with the Zune theme created by Microsoft to celebrate the launch of their MP3 player. It seemed someone had leaked them without having tested them properly.

Bearing that in mind, an independent designer has finished the job on his own and now presents Royale Remixed, a theme for Windows XP that fixes all the bugs in the Noir and Zune themes and adds everything the original themes lacked.

Royale Remixed will not only change your desktop wallpaper and windows appearance, but it will also replace your system icons, mouse cursors and system sounds with new files. The result looks like a completely new system with a really attractive design.

That said, note that Royale Remixed is not as easy to install as it seems. If you have problems installing it, it's probably because you need to patch a DLL file (see Notes). I had this issue and it took me some time and a few Google queries to find out what was happening. Also, if you want to customize the shutdown window to match the rest of the system, you'll have to modify another couple of DLL files. Fortunately, this process is very clearly explained in a TXT document included in the program's ZIP file.

Customize Windows XP with this shiny, elegant black design.