Change Default Wallpaper Folder to My Pictures on Windows XP

Have you ever wondered why Windows XP
had such terribly ugly wallpapers to choose from? On top of that, there's no way
to easily change the list of backgrounds to a folder you might actually use…
like your My Pictures folder.

There's a fairly simple registry hack you can do to make Windows look in a different folder, but if you want to get rid of Blue Lace 16 you'll also have to delete it manually. (The standard
warnings about registry editing apply here)

With a name like "Bliss" you would think I would be less tired of seeing this:

Change Wallpaper Folder

Open up regedit.exe using the start menu Run box, and then navigate down to
the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

On the right-hand side you should see a value called WallPaperDir, which
defines the folder Windows uses to populate the list. If the key does not exist,
then you can create a new string value with the same name.

Double-click to change the value, and then paste in the full path to your My
Pictures folder. (Note that you could specify any path here if you wanted to.)

The change should be immediate, the next time you open the Desktop panel… but
you'll notice a number of default images still in the list. Turns out that
Windows also queries the Windows folder for images…

To get rid of those, browse to C:\Windows and then look for a set of horribly
ugly Bitmap files:

You can delete these images to make them stop appearing in the wallpaper
selection list, just be careful not to delete anything else in your Windows
folder or you likely won't be able to boot anymore.

Another annoyance solved…