Fixing Lord Of The Rings Online Borderless Windowed Fullscreen

Update 20 March 20120: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

I've been trying to figure out a way to fix the windowed border issue present in games such as Lord Of The Rings Online (LOTRO) in Windows. Usually when trying to run a game in borderless windowed fullscreen, I would set the resolution to the monitor native resolution and  use the program ShiftWindow to coordinate the screen so that the borders would not be visible (guide). However, games like LOTRO forcefully resize the window so that the border is always visible, no matter how you try to manipulate it. So I thought about some other solutions, and hopefully some more intelligent person will help me to figure it out, and in turn, help to fix the same issue in lots of other games too.

So the I've tried a number of methods to try and  reduce the border so that the window can be rendered in borderless windowed fullscreen mode. The most common suggestion on the forums is as activating options in the UserPreferences.ini  in the \Documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\ folder which no longer works. This option (AllowFakeFullScreen=True, ForceFakeFullScreen=True, FullScreen=True) seems to have worked at one point but was patched out.

I started thinking that there must be a way of manipulating the border on the window through some other method. Themes must have a way of setting the border of the window styling so that the border is not shown. Certain options can be changed so that the borders are less noticeable. By going into Control Panel -> Change window colors and metrics, there are a few options.

The Active Title Bar, Active Window Border and Border Padding all play a role in how much of the window is viewable.

This is the default Windows 7 styling.

This is with some small adjustments.

Themes in Windows 7 allow the window border to be customised but the Active Window Border cannot be reduced below '1' in this interface. If may be possible for a custom theme to completely remove the border and the title bar. If this could be done then all we would have to do is activate a theme to get a borderless windowed fullscreen LOTRO.

However editing the 'metrics' in Windows 7 themes is quite a complicated task. It requires the editing of the theme, which is something I don't know much about. There are some more details from Microsoft regarding theme editing.

If anyone can make this work please let me know!