VistaStyleBuilder

Hi,

I've read that some people here are having sporadic crashes with VSB.
While I am fortunately not among them, I have turned off my computer without saving my work recently (Tip #2:  Try to avoid working half awake  :-[).

So does all your progress disappear when such catastrophe's happen?

Nope! -- Unless you never ended up testing your theme while using VSB (unlikely and strange practice).
Fortunately, VSB creates a .tmp file (which is just a renamed .msstyles file) in the "%temp%\Shell\NormalColor\" directory whenever you press the "Test" or "Reload Test" buttons.  It basically creates a temporary snapshot of your theme's progress.

So how can I recover my work?

1.  Go to: Start -> Run -> %temp% (enter that in the Run input box)
2.  In the "%temp%" folder, look for ave****.tmp (the **** are wildcard placeholders for the hexadecimal characters that appear) -- for example, you might see a file called "ave1E72.tmp".
3.  Rename the file to your theme name and change the .tmp extension to .msstyles.
4.  Open the theme in VSB and test it to see that it's a recent snapshot.
5.  Once confirmed, bring the file over to your theme's folder.  ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP BEFORE REPLACING!

--

To Ave:  Perhaps you can create a recovery option that uses this method, and maybe a way to select your own shellstyle.dll (outside of the one in the temp folder)?  :)  Thanks for your program and the recent Undo/Redo options which are very helpful!

1. Recovery sounds like a nice idea.
2. VSB actually searches for a shellstyle in the same place where your style is saved normally, it looks inside the shellstyle/ folder.

Cool, thanks for taking the suggestion into consideration.

I also noticed that I accidentally wrote "%temp%\Shell\NormalColor\" instead of just "%temp%", and so I fixed my post.

I can't believe I didn't look at this post when it was happening to me. Thanks :D