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How can I have 256-color icons in my tray under Windows 2000?

Under Windows 2000, unless you patch your explorer.exe, the System Tray will not display any 24bit or 256 color icons. It will only display 16 color icons, and will dither the rest to fit into the 16-color display.

Go to http://www.dr-hoiby.com/TrayIconIn256Color/index.php for details on how to patch it, or follow these instructions to manually patch it:

A) Check if your explorer.exe version is 5.0.3700.6690

B) Edit your "explorer.exe" file

1) At Offset : 0x088E6, check this bytes {0x6A,0x2C,0x6A,0x40,0xC7,0x44,0x24,0x18,0x01,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xFF,0x15,0x68,0x11}
	 If it's ok change the 9's byte (0x01) to (0x11)
	
2) At Offset : 0x14E1D, check this bytes {0x83,0x3D,0x28,0xB3,0x41,0x00,0x00,0x6A,0x01,0x5B,0x74,0x11,0xFF,0x77,0x04,0xE8}
	 If it's ok change the 9's byte (0x01) to (0x11)
	
3) At Offset : 0x14E2E, check this bytes {0x0B,0xFF,0xFF,0x85,0xC0,0x74,0x05,0xBB,0x01,0x20,0x00,0x00,0x6A,0x01,0x6A,0x00}
	 If it's ok change the 9's byte (0x01) to (0x11)

 The above taken from http://www.dr-hoiby.com/TrayIconIn256Color/PatchInfos_5_0_3700_6690.html, go there for better info.

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