OK, I finally made it work, but there is a problem with Win 7 Style Builder. It occurred to me that one reason why the system might not be reading the msstyles file correctly was those weird numbers that W7SB assigns to the image resources, all above 10000 instead of starting at 508 as the original aero.msstyles does. Then I remembered reading something about this in these forums about an option to not change the image IDs and I searched for it again, figuring that at best I could try to match the real image IDs to the raw list in Restorator and change what I wanted. But after I opened W7SB with the -noupdateimageids option I thought I could make a couple of changes and see if it would work, and this time the style applied correctly, so I kept making all the wanted changes and updating it.
But clearly the software has a big bug if in its default state the saved style doesn't get applied but it does when you open it with a specific option, which according to that thread where it's discussed it doesn't allow Stylehacks to be applied to it. Still, it's much more useful than just opening the file in a Resource program and trying to figure out which image corresponds to what, but still is far from being user friendly. I mean, at least the author should have a place on his website showing all the different elements of the GUI, one screenshot for a Windows Explorer window, another for the start menu, etc, with arrows pointing to the different areas and what's the path in his software to replace them. Many paths in W7SB are still very cryptic, maybe GUI programmers might know those names better, but I don't and I don't have to. Another problem is that I see the same paths repeated more than once in the tree but some of the instances don't have any properties or images in them, so why are they there? My guess is that some belong to the msstyles usage in Vista and some to Win 7, but if that's the case, then there should be two programs, one for each OS, not paths that are still there but are empty depending on which OS is used. That only adds noise to the process when a user is trying to find elements to change.
Finally, this software could use more key shortcuts. What I did yesterday would have taken me several less minutes if I wouldn't have had to reach for the mouse every ten seconds to click on the Edit button.
I agree, the product could use a bit more polishing. 1.5 will be better because of documentation support and all the Windows 7 bugs out.
To answer one of your concerns:
- The repeated entries are often for the Basic parts. If there are no images there, then it either inherits the image from the Aero branch or vice-versa. Not easily understandable, I know.
