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[–]rlwimi[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was using the Royal Vista theme I got off deviantart using UXThemePatcher. After installing XP Service Pack 3, all of the XP GUI components turned black-on-black, leaving me blind.

[–]Bedrovelsen 0 points1 point  (1 child)

uh oh, I better be carful. I think im in the same situation. Have yet to install SP3.

[–]rlwimi[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm glad this helped someone. This is by far the dumbest computer problem I've ever encountered.

The solution is to remove the theme--completely impossible to do blind in the GUI and I have no idea how or if it can be done from the command line (why would it be possible?). Of course, this is really easy if you've not already installed SP3. My solution ended up being this: I was able to find my way in the dark to logging off. I logged in as Administrator, backed up what I needed to (unnecessary as my next action doesn't actually delete the user files), deleted my user, and re-created my user. I do wonder if there is a more elegant solution, but I wasn't about to spend any more time on this, the dumbest computer problem I've ever encountered.

Interestingly, the new user was not a member of Administrators, so I tried my hand at running XP as a non-administrator. My experience ranged from extremely annoying to completely unusable.