Wb Doesn't Skin Windows Anymore...

I left my computer on 'sleep' for about 1 hour. I came back and windowsblinds stopped skinning everything... I tried to reload the skin and this error message came up...

An exception occured while trying to run "Shell32.dll,Control_runDLL desk.cpl,,0"

Windowblinds will not skin anything anymore. I can skin my windows using Xp's skinning engine.

I've loaded up shellwm aswell. Shellwm can skin my windows too...

The only thing I have really done in the past few days is document work...I haven't modded anything besides notepad and cleared my icon cache from tweak xp...

I also haven't touched any control panel extensions... (I apparently have though)...

Any help/knowledge would be appreciated.

Cheers

#30806

Have you just tried to reinstall WindowBlinds? Windows is telling you there is a problem. Its telling you something is wrong with desk.cpl. This is your display settings control panel as you know and WindowBlinds gets intagrated into it on install. It sounds to me like WindowBlinds got corupted and posibly took desk.cpl with it. You did not tell us what version of Windows you are running. That helps us help you. If you are running Windows XP and you are using using the FAT32 files system instead of NTFS then that can also be an issue. The FAT32 file system has no built-in way of recovering damaged files and on crashes, hard reboots, and occasionaly when waking from sleep mode you can get corupted files. This often happens. Thats why most sites and exerts say to format your drives to NTFS when running Windows XP. If you are running on a NTFS formated drive than I might suggest doing a system rollback using the "System Restore" utility that came with Windows. Again this will only work with Windows ME and XP. Find a rollback point before you started having problems. This just might put everything back to right. Its worked for me and countless others several times in the past. If you are using Windows 98 then you might be looking at doing a "Dirty Install", that is an install of Win98 over your present install also known as an upgrade install. If you lost your desk.cpl file than you probably lost many other system files as well. It would be a good idea to clean everything up and this will save everything you have installed and it should still work when you are done. If this and a reinstall of WindowBlinds does not get you up running again than its very posible you are looking at a total format and reinstall of either Windows 98, ME, XP. Those are the breaks. I know what I am talking about here I do this kind of trouble shooting and repair, and reinstalation of Windows every day for a living. I wish you all the luck in the world. I will check back if you have any other questions.

#30839

Are you using version 3.5? If so, there was an inadvertant timeout in the code that made it stop working. You need to download v3.51 from Stardock. If that's not your problem, I haven't a clue as to why it stopped then.

#30967