// 2006 — 2026
A history of Lee-Soft
Twenty years of start menus, taskbars, dock bars, transformation packs, and an entire desktop-customisation subculture that Microsoft eventually outlasted. Here's the long version.
2006 — A prototype in someone else's transformation pack
ViStart didn't start as a product. It started as a prototype I wrote in VB6 to get a Vista-style start menu running on Windows XP, and the first place anyone saw it run was inside Lucifiar's Vista Transformation Pack — a "make XP look like Vista" mod that was massively popular at the time. Lucifiar bundled the early builds, did the QA on them, and was effectively the first publisher of every version. There was no lee-soft.com yet. There wasn't even really a "Lee-Soft." There was just a teenager in the UK and an editor in the WindowsX scene shipping each other test builds over MSN.
2007 — Lee-Soft becomes a thing
ViStart needed its own home, so I bought lee-soft.com and split the project out as a standalone product. Two early collaborators turned up almost immediately: skipper, who rebuilt the installer in late 2007, and Alex (fediafedia), a forum mod who used Resource Hacker to swap bitmaps inside the EXE and produce a Russian language pack — a hack that ended up merged into the official build. Alex would go on to keep the forums alive for years.
The site nearly didn't survive its first year. Around Christmas the shared host wanted to shut me down for CPU usage — WordPress was eating the server alive — so I stripped the site to its bare bones and lost most of the theme just to stay live. That kind of thing was fairly normal in the era; the modern web is so over-provisioned that we forget how rickety self-hosted forums and blogs were in the late 2000s.
2008 — Maturation, and the skinning ethos
ViStart found its shape. The skin format opened up — community members could write their own skins in plain XML, no compilation required, and a real third-party gallery formed on deviantArt. By the end of 2008 ViStart shipped with native UI translations for nine languages: English, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Dutch. Almost no comparable tool of the era did i18n at all.
Press started picking it up. Lifehacker: "Freeware app ViStart brings the functionality of the Windows Vista Start Menu to Windows XP." vnunet: "ViStart is a good example that makes the Windows XP Start Menu look just like that of Vista." Cybernetnews: "ViStart is the standalone Start Menu that runs in Windows XP, and perfectly replaces your Start Menu." AskVG in particular became a regular venue. By the next year the German tech magazine Chip.de was hosting it on their downloads catalogue.
2009 — The big year
Three things happened that all shaped what Lee-Soft became.
First, I rewrote ViStart almost completely. The earlier builds had to "hack" Explorer to insert themselves into the start area — it worked, but to quote what I wrote at the time, "the only reason I didn't use ViStart myself was because it kept crashing Explorer." The 2009 rewrite pinned down the bugs that had been plaguing it for two years: the magical transparent text box on XP, the shutdown-hang that came from mishandling WM_QUERYENDSESSION and WM_CLOSE, the keyboard-focus theft. The current 8.1.x line traces back to that rewrite.
Second, ViGlance launched. It started life codenamed 7Bar, then SuperBar, before settling on ViGlance — a Windows 7-style taskbar for XP and Vista. I co-developed it with Lucifiar, who tested over 900 builds during development. The first public release shipped inside Lucifiar's Seven Transformation Pack. The Summer Edition added "live thumbnails" — hover-preview popups, which Vista and 7 had natively but XP didn't.
Third, Seven Transformation Pack 4.0 dropped in November, bundling the new ViStart, a custom ViGlance, and TrueTransparency. STP 4.0 also introduced the vilang.sif format — a plain-text translation file that finally let people localise the UI without hex-editing the EXE. The German and French translations had originally landed via Resource Hacker; vilang.sif was an admission that wasn't sustainable.
2012 — Windows 8 arrives without a start menu
In February 2012 Microsoft shipped the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. There was no start menu. There was no start orb. The internet collectively lost its mind, and ViStart had its biggest moment. The /news/windows-8-start-menu/ post became the highest-traffic page in the site's history — it's still the top entry in the redirect table at over 2,700 hits. ViStart on Windows 8 wasn't just a nostalgia tool any more; it was a way to actually use the operating system.
That April I shipped ViPad — a Launchpad-style fullscreen launcher with tabs, categorised icons, keyword search, and (this was 2012) touch and finger-gesture support, which felt extremely futuristic for a Windows app. The settings lived in %appdata%\ViPad\settings.xml for anyone who wanted to edit by hand.
ViStart was also covered around this time by Japanese magazine iP!, published by SHINYUSHA in Tokyo. The editor wrote in asking permission to ship ViStart 1.6 and ViSplore 0.9 (the latter a glass-style file browser with breadcrumb navigation and a type-ahead QuickFind, which I'd been building alongside ViStart and which ultimately never made it past 0.9) on the magazine's cover DVD-ROM. That was the first time I genuinely understood that Lee-Soft was an actual project that strangers half a world away were using and writing about.
2016 — Reunion: the El Capitan Menu bar
A few quiet years. Then in February 2016 Lucifiar and I shipped ViFind — originally called the El Capitan Menu bar, after the contemporary macOS release it was inspired by. It puts a Mac-style menu bar across the top of your Windows screen, lifts the focused app's menu bar into it, and includes a start button so you can still get to the Windows menu in a Mac-shaped way. The version number — 0.0.0.201 — was honest. ViFind was always pre-1.0. The repo is still called ViDock from when it was a slightly different idea, and probably always will be. We called it the dream-team reunion. It still works. Pleasantly rough.
2017 — Ten years, and a pivot
Lee-Soft turned ten in November 2017. I'd just turned thirty. I wrote a long anniversary post that, looking back, contained the seeds of every decision I made about the project for the next decade. The most important of those decisions was that the source code shouldn't die with me. ViOrb — my standalone start-button replacement, originally a 2007 spin-off, described in its own GitHub readme as "designed to be the last start button replacement tool for all versions of Windows" (which feels about right) — became the first Lee-Soft project to go open source. I wrote at the time that I was starting to think about code less like a thing you write to make something work and more like composing music. That framing is what makes everything that's happened since make sense.
2018–2022 — The desktop-modding scene fades
Windows 10 stopped fighting its users quite so hard. The thing that made third-party start menus and taskbars feel essential — Microsoft repeatedly removing the parts of Windows people relied on — slowed down. Many of the people who'd built the Windows-customisation scene in the 2000s aged out of it. The transformation-pack era was effectively over. ViGlance and ViFind shipped their last binaries in 2018 and stayed there. ViStart kept getting maintenance commits but no big features. I had a job, then a different job, then a kid. Life moved on.
2023 — A return for Windows 11
Earlier in 2023 I'd put a quick survey on the homepage just to see what people wanted from the apps. About fifty answers came back, and they were almost unanimous: keep it working on newer Windows, fix the bugs. There's something quietly humbling about realising the audience for a 16-year-old free utility had a list of demands and was just waiting to see if you'd address them.
So in March 2023 I shipped ViStart 8.1.0.5311 with Windows 11 support. Microsoft had moved a few things around in the new shell that ViStart was poking at directly — pinned items, the recent-files list, the way Explorer opens folder contents — so a chunk of the work was just teaching ViStart to behave when Windows handed it back something it didn't expect. The same release fixed a long-standing regression where recent-items folders were opening in Explorer instead of expanding inline; the Win7-style hover-to-expand was finally back.
2026 — Community handoff
Today, the site you're reading. Rebuilt from scratch as a static site after the WordPress install ate itself. The four apps — ViStart, ViPad, ViGlance, ViFind — are all open source on GitHub, with .NET ports underway as I get to them. The Discord is open. The Patreon I'd half-forgotten existed is still there if anyone wants to throw a few quid at the lights.
The apps still work, which is more than most software can say after twenty years. The VB6 runtime is still on every Windows install — Microsoft would shut it down if they could but they can't, because too much enterprise software depends on it, and so by accident a piece of late-1990s tooling is still keeping a small corner of the desktop-modding scene alive. There's something quite nice about that.
Lee-Soft isn't all I work on these days. The GitHub org also hosts a handful of unrelated side projects — BrowserDroid, an Android utility that streams your phone's screen to any browser on your local network and lets you control it with mouse and keyboard, made it onto the Play Store recently (source). The rest are smaller experiments — some shipped, some abandoned — all open if anything catches your eye.
Hosting kindly provided by Mykola — thank you, still.