O ye without shame

By which, of course, I mean me.

I've had XP on the notebook for four years and more, and not once did I hit Regedit to screw around with the Evil Farging Registry*. Give me four days with XP on the desktop, and suddenly I'm trying to do Registry hacks.

Actually, this situation is born of frustration. The old patterns-plus-wallpaper from Windows of old has been replaced in XP with a simple Background app in Control Panel; my wallpaper-switcher of choice, in the W98SE days, would swap out the photograph every 19 minutes and leave the pattern in place. In XP, there is no spoon pattern; the switcher works just fine, but the pattern, which I used to use as a framing device, does not appear.

So far I have tried writing a Pattern description directly to the Registry and running the old W98 Control Panel Desk app. Neither has been successful — or my current color scheme is so somber that I can't see the darn thing. (I swear by the Windows Classic "Rainy Day" theme.)

I'm sure this proves something, though I'm not sure what.

* "Evil Farging Registry" is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved to Bill G.

Update, 7:30 pm: Problem solved with (1) Registry hack and (2) mondo tweakage to monitor settings.

Posted at 6:14 AM to PEBKAC