Longhorn 4074 Product Key

[Cheryll Witting]

Alot of people have been struggling to get Aero to work in build 4074. In this post I want to show you how Aero can be enabled along with a little history. If you came here looking for information about Aurora, please see my post about Aurora & Aero.

During the development of Longhorn the exact look of the Aero theme was kept a good secret. Aero remained off-limits even for most shell developers. Two developers that surely had access are Kam Vedbrat and Scott Hanggie. Until September 2004, Kam Vedbrat had been a lead program manager on the Aero effort by the shell team. On Channel9, he elaborates on how Aero is designed.

Although there is no way to tell when this screenshot was taken and on which build, I tend to think it was taken on one of the many 4050 lab06_demo builds compiled during 2003 leading up to the PDC 2003 demo build. By default, the build from the lab06_demo branch had an appearance similar (if not identical) to the publicly released build at PDC 2003, 4051. In contrast to the public build these builds, however, did have full support for Aero. The sad news that the public build would not yet feature Aero was brought by Paul Thurrott in September:

When build 4074 was given to attendees of the WinHEC 2004 event people immediately started wondering whether Aero was present in this build as well. In a webcast , highlighting the progress made in build 4074 technical evangelist Dave Massy said:

Although Microsoft employees denied any claims of Aero and DWM being present and even claiming that it was left out this build on purpose, DWM was found working in build 4074. It was discovered that the Jade theme present in builds 4066 and up could unlock parts of the Aero style.

Now we are going to enable the beautiful transparency that we so longed for. All we need to do is add a registry key. Open the registry editor (regedit). Browse to: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer. In this key, add a DWORD called MILExplorer and set its value to 1. If you would also like to enable the Aero stars, also add a DWORD called MILDesktop with the value of 1. The moment has come to get a glimpse of Longhorn glory: go to Display Properties and choose the newly created Aero theme. Apply the settings. After the theme is applied you will be greeted by a nice transparent taskbar and sidebar.

If everything went correct, you should end up with something like the picture below. Note that the screenshot also shows the Animated Aurora Preview Pane. More information on how to patch the theme can be found in another post. You might have also noticed that the borders on all windows are still actually opaque and not the Aero translucent kind. Unfortunately, the original resources are not available in any build. There are, however, a few very good patched theme files with transparency available on the internet as well as a build of 4074 (TWIWMTB) that has a pre-patched theme file.

Windows Longhorn Reloaded is a bootleg Windows Longhorn 4074 edition, which was created by a group on the (now defunct) forum JoeJoe, designed to make Longhorn build 4074 more stable. Apparently, Microsoft was quite embarrassed by how much more "stable" this OS was compared to their then three-year-old beta, so they sent a cease and desist letter to kill it. Unfortunately for Microsoft, weirdos on the internet kept copies. Anyhow, it released in 2007, and was added to the archive on December 26, 2021.

On the first boot, the OS deletes some files and launches an optional installer program called "Longhorn Reloaded Tempory Installer", which replaces a few files and sets some registry keys. Other than that, the OS remains mostly the same as stock 4074.

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