Incompleteness of Luna theme is becoming apparent

Quick history lesson: Over the past several years, I've been learning more and more about how to make Win Vista/7/8/10 suck less: how to gain ownership of the "Program Files" directories, how to install and use Classic Shell, that sort of thing. I eventually got Win7 to the point of being relatively painless to use, and functioning almost identically to XP except for the lack of animated wallpapers. Nowadays, despite having an XP partition, I spend most of my time in Win7.

Anyway, I've gotten quite used to the heavily modified Aero themes I'm running (black on my laptop, ice blue on my desktop). When I switch back to my XP partition, The Luna theme and themes which are derived from it, like Embedded, look kind of... ass. Title bars and the taskbar still look as good as ever, but the Start menu looks unfinished. The background color is a pure stark white, and there's no bevel like the Classic theme has, nor is there a colored border like Aero and Metro have. The background color can be fixed easily enough in the advanced settings (color values 212, 208, 200 should get you the perfect shade of gray) but I can't fix the lack of a border or bevel. It just looks lazy and makes me want to switch to the Classic theme. I can't believe I never noticed this before.

However, this is a slightly unfair comparison, because I'm using Classic Shell to get Win7 to look good and I'm not using any third-party software to make XP look better.

 

Windows XP allowed more customization of its interface than 7, 8, or 10 without using third party utilities such a classic shell (although you did have to modify the uxtheme.dll system file to allow the use of non-microsoft themes).

See this thread for a few examples:
https://www.xpforums.com/threads/christmas-themes-for-xp.934076/

You can customize the radio buttons, backgrounds, start button and media player buttons etc.

Here's a screenshot of theme for XP showing just how much can be changed:


The referring page to download this theme:
https://themes4pc.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/quantria-wb-windows-xp-theme/

Like you I use Windows 7 primarily and was disillusioned at the lack of customization of the aero theme without installing a third party shell replacement. You can change the color, hue, transparency but that's it.

 

Luna Theme is the one thing I hated about XP when I saw it. As soon as I found out you can go "classic" I didn't mind it at all. This was back when XP came out and I was still slumming on WindowsME.

In Windows 7 and beyond, your interface abilities are crippled, yes. Also, if you want to change file association icons, this option is removed.

I prefer to give my interface different icons for different formats (i.e. AVI, MP4, MPEG, FLV, WAV, MP3, WMV, et al).

Once I found out that Windows 7 has a program called "Classic Shell" I used this on computers that were forced to have windows 7 on them.

Additionally, "Classic Shell" fixed another gripe I had with the Windows 7 interface that changed how when you right-click a program opened in the task bar, it didn't have all of the old options unless you held down an additional keyboard button (for Restore, Minimize, Maximize, Move, Close options).

Also, hated the Windows Menu. Always preferred classic. They eventually broke away from that too.

XP is simple and configurable, without being too much of a mess. Unfortunately, it's been left behind and no future of a real "Classic" Windows.

 

To clarify, I'm talking about the way the Start menu looks when you set the menu style back to Classic while running Luna or a Luna-derived theme:

 

Actually, the Embedded theme does in fact have a Classic-style gray bevel around its menu edges. Setting the menu color to 212, 208, 200 gets the menus to look pretty decent. I think I'll stick with this for a while.

 

Upon further inspection, Aero was never quite finished either. It too lacks proper skins for its menus.



So, I think I'll stick with the Classic theme on my Win7 partitions and a modified Embedded theme for my XP partition.