i'm curious if anyone else is experiencing this. i am using wsx 9.5 under vista sp1. when i use an older theme, say 2006 or older it sometimes works okay for a while but then rather suddenly when i open the workshelf it will be cropped (invisible)from where the top of the workshelf is in the closed position up. sometimes reverting back to the default settings solves it temporarily, sometimes not. i only experience this with older themes. is this a known issue? are there any fixes or workarounds? theres not a lot of new themes coming out which makes it tempting to try older themes but i have yet to use one trouble free. is there a date i should look out for? for example should i use anything more than a couple of years old? should i just scrap the older themes because of lost compatability? so many questions.

i am also using third party msstyles (uxtheme.dll hack), any relationship to this behavior?

I don't know. Can you post a screenshot of the problem please?

using apollo (11/2003)

as you can see its kinda hard to put into words haha. i haven't had any probs at all with themes from about 2008 on.

oops, that is to say themes made since 2008

Hehe, I got it, don't worry.

I think it might be a bug. Older themes did not use PNG files for backgrounds, but rather BMP files with 'magic pink' for transparency.

WSX supports both types of themes but has to deal with them in different ways. I'll see if I can reproduce the bug here.