Hey, is there any way, what-so-ever to use visual styles in windows vista? perhaps using windows xp ports.. i've known that using windowblinds is possible, but i miss the old uxtheme.dll hack and just dropping a folder into my resources/themes/ directory, and loading it up.
I'm afraid not. While you can patch uxtheme.dll in Windows Vista and patch aero.msstyles in Vista with differnent images, the msstyles in XP are completely different.
As you indicated, you can run WindowBlinds on Vista and if you install SkinStudio you can run XP msstyles in Vista. WindowBlinds and UXTheme are pretty similar (you're using wblind.dll instead of uxtheme.dll is the basic difference).
Here are two screenshots of popular XP .msstyles running on Vista with WindowBlinds:
Dude if you look on Deviantart, they've added a section recently for vista visual styles, they work in the same way that uxtheme.dll ones do for Xp. Use the program vistaglazz (google) and install it, then run it and there is a patch option which automates the whole process and has worked seamlessly for me. Then find the files on Deviantart. Easy peesy :D
uhh i stay away from vistaglass now theres been a bunch of problems with their latest patch causing irreversible changes like having only the classic theme and rundll errors