Which Service controls the XP visual theme?

I recently noticed a lot of services running on my machine, and in an effort to save resources, disabled a lot of them. I did this all by doing research on each one to see which was necessary, so I didn't think I had done anything out of line, but when I restarted, my XP themes were reverted back to the win98 style, see screenshot.

Does anyone know which of the services provides this style? It's not practical to go through each of them and restart the computer each time...
See screenshot for list of services I've kept enabled, and which I disabled.

Also, strangely, I kept Task Scheduler enabled, but when I restarted it wasn't working, and in the Services tab it now says Stopped. How come? I never disabled it.

Any help is appreciated.

 

Many of the services depend on other services to function, so evidently you have disabled something that's needed indirectly. Hard to say which one. Unless you are extremely short on ram, I'd suggest just leaving everything alone, in it's default state. You're more likely to cause problems otherwise. And in the end, not much is really gained by turning services off.

 

Do you think it might be the 'Themes' service?

You have many services stopped that normally should be running. Some perhaps because you've set them to 'manual' and they don't need to be running at the moment, but more likely you've disabled their startup altogether.

No need to restart the computer to enable/disable services. Just stop or start them from the option box.
I'd recommend you set any service you're not sure you need to 'manual' startup, then reboot the computer and see what's running. Anything then running under 'manual' should probably be set to 'automatic'-- and I think right off the bat you should have any 'COM' service, the 'Secondary Logon' service, and the 'Event Log' service set to automatic.
Those are just some that stood out immediately.

While it's most certainly not necessary to have every service under the Sun enabled or running at all times, when you disable or stop services that need to be running, you're going to find your machine exhibiting strange and undesired behaviors.
Perhaps you've noticed that already?

Either have a valid reason for disabling/stopping a service, or don't do it.
Research and find out why you do/don't want something running before you indiscriminately make changes.

 

If you want to disable services, why not use the Black Viper lists for a start, it's got different settings for XP, Vista, 7.
If you want to revert all settings, it's also got the default listed.
Black Viper XP Home/Pro services page link

And yes, disabling 'Themes' would likely interfere with 'Themes'.
I'd first set everything to default, reboot and then start disabling services.
Don't disable the ones you want disabled all at once, start with 5-10, reboot and check if everything works out.
Then disable the next lot etc.

 

The first thing you should do is turn Event Log back on, to Automatic. That could end up seriously crippling you. Other XP services you should never disable: Plug & Play, RPC, WMI. DCOM carries out background defragmentation as well and should be left alone. There used to be a vulnerability with it but it was patched with SP2.

Everything else depends on the user, and I have mine pretty bare bones because I have 1 gig of RAM. But if I had plenty I wouldn't even bother, really, besides those few that present attack vectors like Remote Registry & SSDP. I disable them before I even connect to the internet for the first time.

If you're looking to save resources Security Center, System Restore, and Themes are some of the biggest hogs. The first is completely useless, the second as well if you use 3'rd party imaging/backup software instead (recommended), and the latter is the culprit for why your themes went old school on you.

I disable that one too. Personally I prefer the old school look. I have classic Control Panel, Start Menu, Windows, and Logon.