During Royale‘s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused glass effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named Royale Noir, it even works with Office 2003.

Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall feel (they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark.

You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.

If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.

This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.

So go ahead and download it if you want to stand out from the crowd!

Thanks goes to W3bbo who did an amazing job uncovering this mystery XP theme, hats off to him! 🙂

Via: I Started Something