Windows Blinds do have a proformance hit on your computer.

The other Visual Styles use the XP Theme Engine, and you shouldn't have a problem or a performance hit with them.

Thanks Tekmaven!

As in "other visual styles" are you referring to TGTSoft's StyleXP?

Actually it all depends in the style theme you're using. I used to use blinds, but then switched to another shell... SharpE, although it's still in beta it works extremely well. It takes a short time to learn, is very good for frequent Windows users, but the best thing is the plugins.

Yes, TGTSoft's Style XP. Just starting to see some good themes!

The latest version of WindowsBlinds seems to only work on WindowsXP. Does that mean that it, too, uses Windows built-in theme engine? Or at least is a lot better than it used to be?

Just thought I would relate my experience with Windowblinds and Object Desktop. I'm running Xp Sp1 by the way. I just finished uninstalling Object Desktop (which wasn't easy to say the least) and i'll never try it again. First of all, I had over ten crashes in two days where I usually average one every two weeks after I installed Object Desktop and picked a skin and a cursor set from Cursor XP. I mean full fatal error, reboot crashes too. second after I turned everything off I tried to use one tool at a time so using windowblinds from the IE tools menu I picked a skin and after that IE would not start. I went to the IE folder and clicked the .exe and it did not even show up as a process. After a reboot it still acted the same even after turning everything to do with Stardock off. So I went to uninstall everything and did with all the programs from Object Destop I could find. After that I reboot and IE still wouldn't come up. I had to manually delete every folder and regkey to finally get IE working again. I have p4 2.8 gig 768 ddr Asus system. It's fast and when all this was going on I tried opening a project in Vs.net and I had an unbelivable performance drop. Blah, blah I know this is a long story but I thought you guys might wanna know what I went thru.
Anyway, maybe you'll have better luck.

My luck was the same jinx.

I tried for a 3rd time (charm right? ....nope!)... and still had too much of a performance lag. So much for Themes in XP.

I tried WindowBlinds years and years ago with Windows 98. When Windows XP came out, I tried WindowBlinds again, hated it, then switched to StyleXP, and will never switch back.