Aero Themes Broken or Themes Service Disabled "Error 1068" or "Error 1075: The dependency service does not exist or has been marked for deletion"

This is a "Discussion" so feel free to reply here with your experiences and findings when repairing an afflicted Themes Service that will not start.

If the Themes Service is not running your desktop may look different in subtle ways (white taskbar, start orb missing/changed to XP style Start button, Explorer shows a tabbed display) and if you try to change the Theme you will find that none of the Themes on this page are clickable:

Another symptom of the Themes Service not running is a mostly white looking taskbar and the Windows Start button orb (bottom left hand corner) has changed to the word Start and looks like this (XP style):

It should look like this:

You may notice that the display of things in Explorer has switched to a tabbed display something like this:

First make sure the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager Service is running.

Click the Start orb/button and enter "services.msc" to open the Services applet and choose to Run as administrator:

Locate the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager Service, double click it to open the Properties and and be sure the Startup type is set to Automatic and that the status is Started.  Make any adjustments so it looks like the example and click the 'Start' button to Start the Service if it is not running:

Next check the Themes Service which should look like this:

If it doesn't look like that double click the Themes Service to open it's Properties and see if you can start it.

If you are seeing something like this attempting to start the Themes Service:

Or you might see this:

The Themes Service should have no dependencies so if yours does then something or somebody must have added something as a dependency.  You may not may not see things listed under the Dependencies tab for the Themes Service so let's check and fix it another way.

Open a Command Prompt as Administrator:

Click the Start orb/button and in the box enter the following:

cmd

Right click cmd.exe and choose to Run as administrator:

Then issue this command to query the Themes Service:

sc  qc  themes

Make a note of what you see listed under DEPENDENCIES so if you need to add something back you will know what that something is.

To help others tell us in your reply what you see on your system listed for DEPENDENCIES.

Lately there have been incidents where the Themes Service has a Dependency of iThemes5.  The iThemes5 dependency could have been added by some third party software, malware or adware and if/when that software was removed the iThemes5 Dependency was left behind.

An example of what that situation looks like is here:

Since there is no iThemes5 Service you will see this when attempting to start the Themes Service:

Since the Themes Service has no dependencies you need to remove all the dependencies from the Themes Service.

To do that issue this command being sure to include the space after the equals sign:

sc  config  themes  depend=  ""

Unless something else is wrong now you should be able to start the Themes Service with this command (or from Services):

net  start  themes

If it still won't start post a screen shot of what you see in the Command Prompt windows when you query the Themes Service with the command:

sc  qc  themes

How to include a screen shot in your topic

If you think you have had a malware episode I would follow up with this:

Many folks like the free version of Malwarebytes that you can download from here:

https://www.malwarebytes.org/dl-confirm/

Towards the end of the installation you should be sure to uncheck this box that says:

Enable free trial of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Premium

Then launch/run MBAM, update the definitions and at least run the Threat Scan to see what it detects and consider letting it remove anything it finds.

If you clear your temporary internet files, the scan will take less time (that is up to you).

The free version does not install any startup items (if you uncheck that box) so it will not interfere with other programs and if for some reason you decide you don't like it you can uninstall it.

It is usually not recommended to run more than one AV program that has realtime protections at the same time on the same system since they might conflict with each other and cause performance problems - again, that is up to you to decide.

Another good idea is to run AdwCleaner (Adware Cleaner) also from Malwarebytes and you can download that from here:

https://toolslib.net/downloads/finish/1/

AdwCleaner can take a long time to run so plan accordingly, don't interrupt it and let is do it's job.