JJ,

Prehaps you're referring to the Windows visual style

:-) You may call it what you want, for me it fits under the header
"switching to classic mode" (together with changing the start menu).

Prehaps you're referring to the Windows visual style which is
changeable via Display control panel. i.e. Classic and XP.

Yep, that one. Funny that the desktop and the taskbar are gouverned by
different registry settings though.

I remember that too, but that doesn't apply to Windows XP and
newer versions.

Ah.

It's probably Win9x that may cause the system to reboot/
shutdown if the desktop process is forcefully terminated.

That is probably what I'm remembering (have been using 98se until just a
couple of years ago).

In XP +, you can actually terminate the desktop process, apply
your settings, then run EXPLORER.EXE to start the desktop
process again.

Shucks. Now you say it I remember having done that before (can't remember
what I was busy with at the time though).

What kind of problems? AutoIt is a pretty good scripting software
in overall, IMO.

It is. Years ago I've even made a multi-group IRC client with it (not that
I really needed it, but just to see if it could be done :-) )

The thing is that I tried to to automate "Folder Options" - "View", and
could not read or alter the checkboxes in the TreeView there. It turns out
what /looks/ like checkboxes (and radio buttons) where in fact not, but
instead re-purposed "filetype" item images.

But before I discovered that I tried to get the mouse to the correct spot
and just MouseClick() the item - which was where I found out that there is
no easy way to get the actual (absolute) position of a TreeView item. When I
than tried to combine the locations of the dialog, the treeview and its item
the resulting (absolute) coordinate did not cause the mouse to move ontop of
the item itself (the combined locations of the dialog and the TreeView
pointed to somewhere quite a bit above the TreeView itself). Not funny.

In short, I've been going thru quite a bit of testing-and-trying before
discovering another, the easier way to do it.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser