i.imgur.com/cFrACJC.png In the pic above you can see that the classic theme is still there even in Windows 10. It's visible for 1 second when I minimize Pale Moon in fullscreen mode (F11) with an explorer window on top of it (Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox). Now I wonder how I can force this theme to show all the time? Someone made a video about it on Windows 8 youtube.com/watch?v=e77JpO8Uk8M&feature=player_detailpage#t=91
The video shows that the user killed Desktop Window Manager. Yes, as being the window manager, DWM is responsible for desktop rendering, and terminating it resets rendering, however normally when you terminate it, it restarts via it's session. This is not a theme in the typical meaning of that term. A theme is a personalization collection including style, mouse, wallpaper, screensaver etc. There is no Classic style in Windows since Microsoft discontinued it and it's personalization dialog (not applicable to high contrast styles). This UX is achieved when you stop the Themes service altogether. When this service is stopped or disabled, "themes" are not available, and if disabled, any service that depends on it will fail to start. Due to it being stopped, the msstyles are not loaded and not rendered, implying barebone UI elements. As such it cannot be called a classic style either, if Themes service is not running to provide styling.
That's a very well put reply, thank you. I am aware of most of what you have said. If you read the op and looked at the imgur link you will know that this "barebone ui" element can be seen through the glitch I described. I guess it's a glitch in msstyles or dwm. It doesn't matter what you call it, the goal is to have that old UI enabled fulltime and not by glitching or going through an unsafe procedure like the one in the video, but to some other way. Like maybe there's some kind of UXTheme style loader/patcher for this purpose?
I think it's impossible to get it back without frankenbuilding your system, and I guess since DWM has become such an integral part of Windows, the result would be pretty unstable. I think it would be much easier if someone did a visual style/theme that mimics the classic look as close as possible (maybe something like this already exists). This way, you wouldn't lose the DWM functionality and still have a Windows that looks like in the pre-XP days. I mean, there's nothing really to gain from brute-force circumventing the DWM etc. just to get the classic Windows look back, it's basically hard-coded drawing routines of the window non-client area (that's why you cannot call it a style, as pointed out above) without any hardware acceleration and such (not that it would matter for such a simple UI on today's machines). It's only there for fallback reasons I guess. Plus: The classic look won't work for Store apps on Windows 10 at all, because the title bar of Store apps is not drawn by the system but provided by a host application (that's what ApplicationFrameHost.exe is for) which is likely to use XAML for rendering. This explains why the title bars look slightly different on Store apps and classic Win32 apps.
Yeah, windowed stored apps draw the titlebar on their own using GDI over DirectComposition which breaks the system consistency. I'm just developing small tool which removes the custom titlebar and completely returns back the DWM frame.
I have a feeling that there probably is some secret way to switch to the classic ui. Like some devs should probably know it, but I guess not all devs. I've seen the themes out there and honestly they don't cut it for me. If this is what I think it is then that makesme excited Good luck and keep us noted!