Remove That Unsightly Focus Rectangle in Windows XP or Vista

How to remove the dotted black outline that sometimes appears while you make a file selection, I realize that I need to write this up for everybody’s help, since there really is a solution. In case you aren’t sure what we are talk about, if you select an icon with the keyboard’s arrow keys and then click somewhere else, you will see a dotted line show up around the icon.

The similar thing will sometimes happen in other areas, like tree controls. To solve this trouble, we will use a small utility called the Universal Focus Rectangle Remover, which unluckily only works on 32-bit Windows (XP or Vista).

You will want to download and extract the zipped file, and then copy the RemoveFocusRect.dll file into the System32 directory, usually located at the following path:

C:WindowsSystem32

You will get a message saying that access is denied, but you should be able to copy the file after clicking through the prompts. After that you will require to open up an administrator mode command prompt and after that run the following command to register the DLL file with Windows:

regsvr32 RemoveFocusRect.dll

You will get a message saying that the registration succeeded. If you get an error, there’s a good chance you are running on 64-bit and it just won’t work. If so, make confident to delete the file that you copied.

Some users don’t want to remove rectangle. For that you can also uninstall it by given method:

Open up an administrator mode command prompt like before, and type in the following command to uninstall the component from the registry (very essential). Note: You will have to be in the Windowssystem32 directory for it to work, but that’s the default path for an administrator mode command prompt anyway.

regsvr32 /u RemoveFocusRect.dll

You should get a message saying that it has been successfully removed. Now you can delete the file simply with this command:

del RemoveFocusRect.dll

You will need to restart your computer to remove the tweak.