Desktop Themes Shrine

A desktop theme is a way to change the look of a Windows installation (Linux and Mac OS (at least older versions ;) ) also have them, but not all Linux distros (distributions) have them; instead you can change all, most, or some of the elements separately). It has its own colors (for not just the taskbar, but every part of the OS, such as menus, selected items and text), icons, cursors, sounds, wallpaper(s) and sometimes a screensaver (sometimes extras too, like custom bootscreens and web view elements for 9x themes and custom start icons for Windows XP to 7 themes). In order for a desktop theme to be a 'complete' desktop theme, it must contain most of (or all of) the elements stated above (colors, icons, cursors, etc.); otherwise it's just a wallpaper pack with a color added to the taskbar (which is good in its own right, but I prefer 'complete' desktop themes).

Desktop Themes were first introduced in Windows 3.0, but they weren't shareable until Windows 95. Using third-party programs for Windows 95 and above (and/or Plus!, an add-on for all Windows versions up to (and including) XP; Windows 95 Plus!, the first version, was released by Microsoft at the same time as Windows 95), you could save & share themes, and make your own. One of them is Desktop Architect (still works on Windows XP, not sure about Windows 7 since Win9x-XP themes don't work on it unless applied manually and resaved as themepacks or you use the Windows 7 Theme Converter; it even works in Wine, and thus you can theme your Windows programs in Linux with it!). Old themes definitely don't work on Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and 11; you can apply them manually, but you can't just click on the theme file, because it gives an error message. Even though there are themes made for these versions, they're not the 9x-XP kind or Vista-7 kind.

ThemeWorld and houseofthemes have 9x-XP themes galore! House of Themes has themes that are compatible with Vista and above, a Windows 7 Theme Converter, and they also release new themes every month. Cool! (I have lots of themes from them and many other places... ;) )

Now, to clear up confusion, here is a list providing what themes the Plus! packs have. (The Plus! packs also have various somewhat helpful applications and extra games, but that'll be all covered in another article).

• Windows 95 Plus! Pack: Includes Dangerous Creatures (256 color icons), Inside your Computer (high color icons), Leonardo Da Vinci (256 colors), More Windows (high colors), Mystery (high color), Nature (high color), Science (256 color), Sports (256 color), The 60's USA (256), The Golden Era (high), Travel (high ;) ), and Windows 95 (256). Here's a YouTube video about it.
• Windows 95 Plus! for Kids: One of my favorites. New themes added are: Baseball (256), Jungle (256), Space (256), Underwater (high color), Horses (256), Bugs (256; a theme creator named Vanessa Zoe made her own version of Bugs and Horses found at ThemeWorld, which is what the links link to; a nice touch is that the [Microsoft] Horses theme is pink ;) ), RE-man (high), Tree House (256; if it was high color though that would make sense since a treehouse is high ;) ), Messy Room (256; not much colors to make a mess with ;) ), and Snowboarding (256 colors).
• Windows 98 Plus! Pack: (Windows 98 contains the 95 Plus! themes by default. Cool! But Underwater's sound scheme was changed; the actual sounds are the same, but the places they play in are different.) One of my favourite packs along with XP's and 95 Plus! for Kids. Here's why: Apart from those, it boasts organic art 3D screensavers (for some of the themes) and eighteen new desktop themes. Here they all are: Architecture (awesome theme and beautiful startup sound), Cathy (it is one of the themes that uses Active Desktop along with Garfield, Jazz, Corbis Photography and FoxTrot; so it has an animated wallpaper which looks funny in higher resolutions; e.g. in FoxTrot the characters blink), Cityscape, Corbis Photography (high color), Doonesbury, Falling Leaves (high colour), Fashion (high), FoxTrot, Garfield (sadly it has only generic cartoon sounds, not quips from the Garf himself or Odie's barks; happily the icons are correct), Geometry (high color), Horror Channel (low-quality sounds, but at least it's high color), Jazz, Peanuts (I like the startup and shutdown sounds of this one), PhotoDisc (high color; two Photo themes :P which is pretty cool), Rock-n-Roll (high color), Science Fiction (high color), World Traveler (high color), and Windows 98 (high color; I love the startup and shutdown sounds of it more than in the default Windows 98 theme ;) ). You can tell whether a theme comes from here or is in by default by looking at the sound files' names. ;) If they're shortened, it's a Plus! Pack theme. (Note: The Windows 98 Plus! Themes for Windows 7 pack by Manan actually only has all the themes from the default Windows 98 installation (assuming the Themes option was enabled during installation)! Since none of them are the themes exclusive to the 98 Plus! pack (eg. Horror Channel), it should be called the Windows 98 Themes for Windows 7 pack.) Did you know #1: This has the most themes out of all the Plus! Packs (and thus the largest description :P ). Did you know #2: There were two scrapped themes! They're Gourmet and Skateboard Kid.
• Windows ME Plus! Game Pack: Cards & Puzzles: Contains zero themes, but lots of cool games. ;)
• Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Resource Kit: Contains three themes (along with an extra wallpaper for the More Windows theme in Windows 95?): Ancient Pathways (256 colors), Tropical Interlude (256 colors, I like the Shutdown Sound), and Windows NT 4.0 (high color (?), I like the sounds). (Fun fact: On the Tropical Interlude wallpaper, the man on the desktop is supposed to be you! Unless you're female and/or young, like me. ;) ).
• Windows XP Plus! Pack: There were two versions of it (Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP and Digital Media Edition), then they got merged into a SuperPack. Oddly, it has less themes than the previous packs; only FOUR! Even more oddly, the themes don't have unique color schemes! Oh well, they're pretty nice still, and quality over quantity after all. The new themes are Aquarium, Nature, da Vinci and Space. Each theme (except da Vinci) has two wallpapers (along with the usual theme elements like screensavers, cursors, icons, etc). They also came with WMP (version 10 and above) skins. (Tangent: I remember using the Aquarium theme with the Nature WMP skin (some cute leaves! ;) ) a few years ago. Normally I'd use the non-Plus! WMP skins like the Ducky WMP skin, the Anemone skin (before I knew how to pronounce it right; I pronounced it like enemy lol), and the DeepBlueSomething and Scooby Doo 2 skins because they looked cool, not necessarily because I was a fan (although I like the Scooby Doo franchise). The WMP visualization I loved the most when I was a kid was the non-Plus! fountain one in WMP 9. :P There were some cool non-Plus! WMP 10+ visualizations though. Tangent over). There are also some WMP visualizations (Windows Media Player 10): Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey, Maxx's Kingdom and Plus! Undersea Wonders. The Digital Media Edition has some skins for WMP 9 (one is called Darkling; it was made by The Skins Factory and it's exclusive to the Digital Media Edition AFAIK). There are also other screensavers (other than the screensavers for the 4 themes) which are all pretty cool: Robot Circus, Sand Pendulum, Mercury Pool and Plus! My Pictures Premium. My favorite one is Sand Pendulum. Here's a YouTube video about the SuperPack.

Windows Vista Ultimate Extras: No themes, and it's not a Plus! Pack which is why it's not on the list. It's similar to a Plus! Pack, but it's actually a series of downloads Microsoft offered only to users of Windows Vista Ultimate; the downloads include (but aren't limited to) a program called DreamScene which allows you to put videos and .gif files as wallpapers, and a fun puzzle game called Tinker (starring a robot, of course ;) ) which has a level editor.

That's it!  I have some fond memories of the XP one, because I grew up with XP. ;) :) Literally all of these themes have screensavers, and I know this because... I HAVE THEM ALL NOW! (Except for Ultimate Extras, all of the NT Resource Kit screensavers, and a lil' bit of the WMP visualizations and skins, but including Gourmet and Skateboard Kid.)

There's also a funny Minecraft Plus! official screensaver released on April Fools 2021. Download here. It's really cool!

Thanks to the following kind people:

• WinWorldPC (for the 95 Kids ISO which I got the 95 Kids themes from)
• YayPonies (MEGA link to a theme collection of sorts; AFTER I got those themes from the ISO, YayPonies shared a zip file of her 98 themes on her Twitter account (link is to the tweet; 56 MB), which contains all of the 95 Kids themes! :P Along with some custom themes including an MLP:FiM theme!)
• Matheus Silagi (link to YouTube video, click on the link in the description; problems with the collection are: only Plus!.part1.rar works [the other parts are corrupted; thankfully that part was all I needed to get all of the 98 Plus! themes], and IconPackager + 98Theme.rar cannot be downloaded because it's blocked by OneDrive which claims it has a virus [Silagi said in one comment in a different Plus! video of his that it was just a game trainer, but he still didn't fix the problem by removing the trainer, even though there's one file in the collection which was uploaded in 2017!])
• Caleb's Collection (link to my upload of it on MEGA; for Gourmet, Skateboard Kid and earlier [but not too different to the released] versions of the themes from the 98 Plus! Pack and all of the themes from the 95 Plus! Pack; I don't remember where I got this from, it could've been from some YouTube comment)
• Archive.org (for the XP Plus! ISO which I used for the XP Plus! themes [fun fact: it has Microsoft Dangerous Creatures {another link} and Microsoft Dogs!] as well as this link which contains all of the Windows Media Player skins and visualizations I loved as a kid [and still do today]! :D )
• Travelling TARDIS (for cool Windows-related videos including the Plus! Packs [95, 98, Kids and NT on his channel so far])
• WadmodderPudu (for archiving all the Windows XP themes that Microsoft released on their site before Vista came along)
• Cephead (for porting the 9x and NT themes over to XP and archiving the Microsoft Golf theme from 98 Plus!)

BetaArchive mentions a Windows 95 Plus! theme called Modern. Searching for it gave no results about it (not even a video!), so it's probably a typo or mistake of some sort.

• Energy Bliss visualization (file not found error)
• Batman Begins skin (same reason as above)
• Catwoman skin (same reason as above)
• Halloween skin (same reason as above)
• Halo 2 skin (same reason as above)
• Livin' It skin (same reason as above)
• SoftSkies visualization (on a different site; asks for your email and some personal info, then refreshes to the same page and does nothing when you confirm)
• WhiteCap visualization (same reason as above)
• G-Force visualization (same reason as above)

But, never fear! The Skins Factory skins can be downloaded from The Skins Factory's site itself (recommended).  The skins made by other people can be downloaded from the WMP Goodies site, which is basically a fansite dedicated to WMP goodies. The G-Force, WhiteCap and SoftSkies visualizations are still available as a free trial from their official site, though I haven't tried 'em out yet, and sadly, they require you to enter an e-mail to download the free trials. I found a download of the Energy Bliss visualization here, although I haven't tested it out yet. A big thank you to The Skins Factory for making their skins available for download, and also thanks to whoever created the WMP Goodies site for preserving the other skins! :D

Note 2: Morphyre can be downloaded fully for free!

Note 3: I tested out the skins in Windows 10's Windows Media Player and they work perfectly!

To install the skins, simply double-click on them. They'll install and you can then click View Now to view the skin you installed. To choose different skins:

1. Right click on an empty place on the custom skin you have active and click Switch to Library, to go back to the default skin.
2. On the default WMP interface, right click on the area at the very top, and select 'Show menu bar' if it isn't already visible. You can also press Ctrl+M.
3. Go to View -> Skin chooser. Choose the skin you want. Voila!

Talia's My Little Pony Desktop Theme - Not FiM / G4, but G1! Since the Wayback Machine hasn't archived it, and Talia's site, Chanth, is gone now, I've put it up for download here.

Windows 95 Plus! For Kids Themes (9.5 MB :P )

Windows 98 Default Themes (external link)

The Windows NT 4.0 themes can be found on ThemeWorld (Ancient Pathways, Tropical Interlude, and Windows NT 4.0).

Windows 98 Plus! Themes (original version)

Windows 98 Plus! Themes for Windows 10 (95 MB :P Make sure to read the ReadMe!)

Windows XP Plus! Themes for Windows 10 (again, make sure to read the ReadMe!)

Windows XP 20th Anniversary Theme for Windows 7 (Made for the 20th anniversary of Windows XP!)

Odie's Ocean Desktop Theme - My first ever public theme :D Uploaded to Mediafire. 28 MB.

The Stanley Parable Desktop Theme (134 MB)

FinFin on TEO the Magic Planet Desktop Theme (11 MB)

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Desktop Theme (10 MB)

Penguins of Madagascar Desktop Theme (9 MB)

Fozzie Bear Desktop Theme (18 MB)

Gonzo the Great Desktop Theme (11 MB)

Homestar Runner Desktop Theme (14 MB)

Windows 95 Plus!

1. Inside your Computer tied with Science
2. Mystery (especially due to the wallpaper)
3. Dangerous Creatures
4. Nature
5. The Golden Era

Windows 95 Plus! for Kids

1. Underwater tied with Horses (one reason why is because of the Clam Recycle Bin icons, which inspired little me to make some stories about a clam named Clammy who looks like those Recycle Bin icons :P )
2. Bugs
3. Jungle (one reason why is because of the Venus Flytrap icons)
4. Messy Room
5. Tree House

Windows 98 Plus!

1. Science Fiction (due to it being a well done theme overall)
2. Architecture
3. Garfield
4. World Traveler
5. Falling Leaves (note: if we include the scrapped themes, Gourmet would replace Garfield due to Garfield's lack of Garfield & Friends sound clips and Gourmet's cool concept and wallpaper, although Garfield would become 5 and push Falling Leaves down to 6 due to me preferring non-abstract wallpaper for general use)

Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Resource Kit

1. Tropical Interlude
2. Ancient Pathways
3. Windows NT 4.0

Windows XP Plus!

1. Aquarium tied with Nature
2. Space
3. da Vinci

That's the end of my desktop themes guide! I got the info from Wikipedia, BetaArchive and some videos (including the ones linked above), and there are some links to some themes above.

Edited on June 08, 2018 (added the fact that the XP Plus! themes have two wallpapers except da Vinci).

Edited a lot on August 5, 2018 (fixed some mistakes hiding in plain sight, such as the fact that I didn't give all my favourite desktop themes; Photography's not a theme [so I made a similar mistake to BetaArchive :P ];  added that 98 contained the 95 themes by default, added credits, etc.).

Edited once more on August 13, 2018 (added Archive.org and Caleb's Collection; Mathew -> Matheus; end of my guide -> end of my desktop themes guide; distros -> distros (distributions); clarified that the themes in Manan's pack are the ones included in Windows 98 by default).

Edited for the fourth time on Nov 6, 2018 (added Top 5 lists; added Coming Very Soon...; other edits).

Edited on Dec 2, 2018 (added link to Caleb's Collection finally!).

Edited on Jan 19, 2019 (added colors, Travelling TARDIS and misc edits).

Edited on Mar 28, 2019 (fixed some more mistakes hiding in plain sight; mostly factual mistakes like mixing up Thirteensomething (the Tiny Toon Adventures episode ;) ) and DeepBlueSomething (the WMP skin), added important new links ;) at least for people who've been looking for the WMP skins and visualizations ;) and misc. edits).

Edited on Mar 30, 2019 (fixed even more mistakes hiding in plain sight; added mention of the Windows XP Plus! Pack screensavers, what 'complete' themes are and Tinker's level editor; added Windows ME Plus! Games Pack to the list; misc edits).

Edited on Apr 11, 2019 (added proper link to YayPonies's upload of his 95 Plus! for Kids themes).

Edited on May 20, 2019 (added a little note to Caleb's Collection link description; I encourage you all to download Caleb's Collection to get your Windows 98 Plus! themes fix until I can get ZIP files of them separately on here; it may take a while ;) ).

Edited on June 13, 2019 (various misc. edits; very soon I'll upload a ZIP file with JUST the 95 Plus! for Kids themes).

Edited on June 20, 2019 (more misc. edits; tomorrow I'll upload the promised ZIP file).

Edited on June 21, 2019 (uploaded the ZIP file! :D Also added Downloads section containing said ZIP file, as well as a divider and headings).

Edited once again on Sun, August 4, 2019 (added section for outdated paragraphs and misc. edits. Coming very soon is a guide for making your own cool themes as a subpage to this article, as well as the Windows XP and 98 Plus! Pack themes! :D )

Edited again on Sat, Feb 1, 2020 (added link to my very own first public theme! :D )

Edited once more on Fri, Feb 7, 2020 (updated theme to Ver2; Ver1 still available on Downloads page)

Edited once again on Thu, Mar 25, 2021 (oh no! The Custom Themes collection uploaded by YayPonies is gone! I have a backup, of course, but it'll take a while to upload it for various reasons, alas. It basically had an MLP G4 theme, the 95 Plus! Kids themes, and a bunch of other cartoon themes too, like Chowder and Tiny Toon Adventures. Removed the dead link for now)

Edited again on Sat, July 31, 2021 (finally uploaded the Windows 98 Plus! Themes :D as well as my download of the YayPonies Custom Themes Collection! Yay! ;) All the theme files do need to be applied manually, but hopefully later on I can make an automatic version. Also edited the excerpt of this page, as well as did various other minor edits)

Edited once more on Thu, Nov 18, 2021 (still working on the Windows 98 Plus! Themes for Windows 10 pack, but at least I finally found some of the missing WMP skins at a cool website, and added a link to it in the Thanks section, and downloaded 'em all! :D Anyway, I have no idea how to apply the text color to Classic blocks, and making it a modern block ruins the page, so...)

Edited on Tue, Nov 30, 2021 (the Windows 98 Plus! Themes for Windows 10 and 11 pack is coming soon, but in the meantime I've made and uploaded a Windows XP 20th Anniversary theme for Windows 7!)

Edited on Dec 16, 2021 (Matheus Silagi's RETURN of the 98 Plus! Themes link is not working, so I changed it to an earlier link [which for some reason doesn't have the IconPackager + 98Theme.rar file])

Edited on Fri, June 24, 2022 (finally uploaded the Windows 98 Plus! Themes for Windows 10 and 11 pack! :D )

Edited on Wed, Oct 5, 2022 (added link to The Skins Factory).

Edited on Tue, Dec 13, 2022 (uploaded the Windows XP Plus! Themes for Windows 10 and 11 pack! :D Haven't tested the WMP skins on Windows 11 yet though. Also added a link to another themes archive).

Edited on Sun, Feb 26, 2023 (added a link to Cephead's archive).

Edited on Thu, Mar 16, 2023 (added new theme).

Edited on Thu, Jan 25, 2024 (added 5 new themes! Moved desktop theme links from Downloads to here. Updated the Windows 98 Plus! Themes for Windows 10, hopefully this update fixes the icons. I'm planning to update my Odie's Ocean theme and release a Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends theme soon).

Edited on Fri, Oct 25, 2024 (added H*R theme).