hi i figured out how to do the msgvsta thing but it only works for image replaces it cant be utilised on flw buttons as they are done using new images so im uncertain as to why willz mentioned the msgvsta thing against those images.

i figured out the show menu button how to make it a flw button, it took a while however as i had to play about a bit with trial and error to get the desired effect, the only concern i have is that when i click my showmenu flw button as its menu intersects the min max and close buttons all 4 buttons light up together while the menu is showing and im concerned thatll look kinda tacky, is there anyway i can control the positioning of that menu, i know its a little bit of topic but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thank you all in advance.

Ok well its obvious I need to clarify what msgvsta is.

During the progression of the Messenger Plus! beta testing period, it was discovered that there were certain files that the skinning system would not replace. After a bit of inspection it was found that this was only occurring under Windows Vista systems. After looking around some more it was found that Windows Live Messenger has a secondary resource file that it calls upon under the Windows Vista operating system.

This file can be found in C:/Program Files/Windows Live/Messenger/msgrvsta.thm
If you open this file in a resource editor you will notice that there is a 4000 group with a list of resources. This is the msgvsta resource group and they will override the normal corresponding msgsres resources when running in Windows Vista.

So in order to be able to replace these resources, Patchou created the “msgvsta” source. The sole purpose of this was to be able to replace a msgrvsta file with your own. So whenever you see the msgvsta comment in the guide it means that the file will need two replace statements, one for xp and one for vista.

How do you do that? Well here is a quick example.
<Picture Id="1444"> <!—Replace the xp 1444-->
      <File>COMMON/1444.png</File>   
      <Metadata>
             <Colorize>false</Colorize>
      </Metadata>                     
</Picture>
                               
<Picture Id="1444" Source="msgvsta"> <!—Replace the vista 1444-->
      <File>COMMON/1444.png</File>   
      <Metadata>
             <Colorize>false</Colorize>
     </Metadata>                     
</Picture>

So as you can see all you have to do is just copy the normal statement add in Source=”msgvsta” and that will replace both the xp and vista resources. It’s really as simple as that. But remember this will only work for the resources that appear in the msgrvsta.thm file. You can not use the msgvsta source for any resource under <New>.

I have added this into part 4 just to make things clearer for everyone and btw stuart if you need help you should really start a new thread rather than going off topic on other ones since that is kinda frowned upon here.

I'll also be getting around to writing Part 5 up sometime this week depending on how much free time i have

ok willz, i had figured out how to do the msgvsta source in the replace section, although i didnt realise it had to be in addition to having an xp version but now i can sort that out. my concern with msgvsta is that it has 20070, 20071 & 20072 which are the resources for the min, max & close buttons.

in i think it was part 3 you said that in order to replace those buttons as they were msnrle's you had to put your replacement images in the new section of your resgroup and create a seperate image for each single state and use contentindex's to reference them, now thats fine until you get to doing the msgvsta part, in the new section of your resgroup you cannot specifify source so cant utilise vista versions and xp versions and therefore the only logical conclusion is that the flw buttons (20070, 20071 & 20072) dont need to reference the msgvsta file so i was somewhat confused as to why your guide says that it does.

im guessing you saw that those numbers were present in the msgvsta.thm file and thought to include them but theres no specific instructions on how to replace those buttons if you use msgvsta.

if you could provide a bit of clarification on that it would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.

The reason those buttons were given the msgvsta description is because there is the possibility that people may use older versions of the min max close rle files (eg the 8.1 ones) and that is what they would need to do in order to get it to work.

Also if people wanted to use the vista buttons on xp then they would have to extract the vista ones from msgvsta and then use the xp replace statement.

If you are using custom resources (i.e anything under the <New> element section) then there is no need to add msgvsta as any custom resource is universal to xp and vista.

oh ok fair enough thanks for clearing that up.