Hi,

So I've been trying to customize a boot screen for the last....8 hours (yh, I'm only so persistent because this is part of a whole visual style theme). I've tried many different guides and followed them to the letter, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. Of those that worked the screen always came out distorted. I dealt with the common issues of it being sp3, boot.ini, and the image needing to be 4-bit. I even got the image to use ONLY two colors, and it still boot up wrong (black and white turned into blue and bluer).

I was thinking maybe I can show you folks two different versions of my boot screen and you guys can maybe take a closer look at it and tell me what's wrong? (and please read my comment after the images)

I've used ResHack and BootEditor (they just didn't work). I've tried TuneUp Utilities, and that's the only one that worked, but I wanted  the progress bar to be small blue circles instead of bars and TuneUp wouldn't allow that customization AFAIK (and I got the progress bar to work, with a different method, read on). I tried BootSkin, and that's the method that kept giving me messed up boot screen (blue and bluer, crisp and correct, if I wanted blue), but the progress bar did look correct.

What do you guys think? I'm at my wit's end Maybe someone can process the images for me?