Windows 2000-style Control Panel Sidebar

Here's an old project of mine that I kind of forgot about until going through my old SSD recently. Oops!

Much like many others here, I often times find myself looking at bits and pieces of the Windows UI and asking myself "How can I make this feel more classic?". One of the things that I've been a bit stumped on for a long time is the sidebar seen in some Control Panel applets.


Now the thing about this type of Control Panel page (the ones that open directly in Explorer itself) is that they were introduced in Windows Vista. And if you ask me, Vista marked the point where the Windows UI officially began to depart from older versions of Windows, and where the classic theme started to feel less and less "classic" as a result (one might say that this trend started with Windows XP, however I would argue that much of XP's UI was still pretty old school, and that you could make a retro style for XP with considerably minimal effort).

In any case, due to this being a relatively new piece of the Windows UI, I didn't really have much of a reference from classic versions of Windows on what to do with it, and I didn't have many good ideas either. That is until one day, I realized that the answer was actually pretty obvious:


After a bit of tweaking, I was able to whip something together that I am quite happy with:


This obviously won't follow the behavior of the Win2k sidebar completely. The text will always read "Control Panel", and the Control Panel icon will always be displayed as well. Even so, I do think that this dresses things up quite nicely, especially if you are using the classic theme. I was very careful about making it as accurate as possible, and the header is even pixel-perfect.

Unfortunately, this does require modifying shell32.dll, which may be an issue for some Win8/10 users out there. But if getting around the authenticode signature isn't an issue for you, then this modification should also work on those operating systems.

To apply this, open shell32.dll (or shell32.dll.mun in more recent versions of Windows 10 and 11) in Resource Hacker, go to "Action" > "Add from a Resource file (*.res, *.mui, *.dll,*.exe) ...", select the .res file, and mark the UIFILE checkbox (make sure you select overwrite under "Duplicates" when importing the resources as well).