For those who don't care for reasoning, I'll get straight to the point. From there I will explain further.
In order to use skins for WLM 9, you need to add a special key to the registry.
Option 1:
Step 1: Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft
Step 2: Create a new key called "DUIDebug". Without the quotes of course.
Step 3: Inside the DUIDebug key, create a DWORD value called "Binary"
Step 4: Set Binary to 0
Step 5: Restart messenger and any changes you make to the XML in msgsres.dll should take effect.
Option 2:
Step 1: Download and import the attached registry file.
Step 2: Restart messenger and any changes you make to the XML in msgsres.dll should take effect.
Ok, for those of you still reading, here's the deal. Starting with Windows Live Messenger 9 (it's technically WLM 14, but yeah), the user interface XML is no longer loaded by default. Instead messenger is using a binary format to put together the interface. While we are still examining this binary format (the easy part is done, just the hard part leff
), however until we create an easier way to edit this binary information, I have discovered a hidden UI debugging mode which forces messenger to load the UI directly from the XML rather using this new method. Because this is a debug feature, it probably will not be included in the final version of messenger. So expect this to change. Once we've got all the needed information we intend to share it with everyone.
Thanks.
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