I have been running WW with the vista skin on several computers for a long while always updating when updates were released. Recently on one of the machines the weather icon just stopped being transparent. I have uninstalled, reinstalled (copied icons from a machine that does display them as transparent, etc.) and done everything I can think of with no success.
Clearly the problem is with me and my computer and not with WW; but I am at a loss.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
abe
On the machine with the icon problem open the WW Options window and click on the Skins tab. Ensure that the Tray and Forecast icons are set to the icon set(s) you want then click on the Open Skin Location button. In the Explorer window make sure the View’s Address toolbar is selected so you can see what folder WW is using for the Skins. Then copy the icons you want to the icons folder in the open Explorer window.
WW supports several locations for skins (three on my systems) and on the machine with the problem it may be looking in an alternative location.
Another approach would be to reinstall the Vista skin on the problem machine.
And a final approach, on the problem machine’s WW’s Options window, check the General tab and see if the Miscellaneous’s Store user files … option is set the same as the other machines.
Possible skin locations:
C:\Program Files\Weather Watcher\Users\Default
C:\Program Files\Weather Watcher\Users[i]Windows Username[/i]
C:\Documents and Settings[i]Windows Username[/i]\Application Data\WeatherWatcher
C:\Users[i]Windows Username[/i]\AppData\Roaming\WeatherWatcher\
The last two being the primary ones on XP and Vista.
I was obviously not clear in my explanation of the “problem”.
While I can load the icon set the icons backgrounds are not transparent as they are on my other machines.
I’m confused.
Many thanks for your time.
a
Well, I’m not 100% sure, but AFAIK the PNG transparency (the icons are PNG files) depends on your Internet Explorer version and/or settings; as far as I remember EdP used to have this issue with his old IE…
Make sure your IE version is the most recent; updating it might help.
Let me know if you were able to resolve this problem.
redhotpaprika, check this out:
http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix
It seems to work with any version of IE.
I updated to IE7 and the “problem” is resolved.
This certainly does not help anyone understand the cause of my transparency problem appearing, but at least now it is gone.
Thanks for steering me in a right direction.
a
abesimpson, the problem is that IE 5/6 does not display transparent areas in PNG files. It is possible to work around that problem by doing something like I posted in the link above. That is something that would have to be done in the skin itself – rather than something you could do on your end.
I have IE 7 on my desktop machine and it’s a dog. As such I still have IE6 on my notebook and have no plans on upgrading it at this time. And I suspect others have encountered the same results and have the same plans so I don’t recommend dropping IE6 support in skins, or webpages, anytime soon.
If IE7 is a dog, IE6 is a cow.
Suggest you use Firefox, Opera, etc. IMHO IE is really only of use for downloading MS updates.
regards
a