I am often working over a remote desktop to a client site, and when it comes to the more laborious tasks such as creating your FIM schema, one thing was always slowing me down ... the default FIM dialog background image (the fancy product UOC_loading_background.PNG that comes with FIM OOTB).

Now the default image certainly looks lovely ... but it's 175 Kb in size, and seems to take my RDP session several passes to render the image each time I say click on the NEW toolbar button to create say a new attribute binding ... this takes up to about 10 seconds each time, and after a while becomes incredibly frustrating.

So ... here's the simple process I took to get over this little hurdle, and now the dialogs present themselves very snappily indeed :)

1. Locate UOC_loading_background.PNG found in %Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\MSILM2\ ... it's easy to spot, just sort by SIZE in your windows explorer, and you'll see this at the very top/bottom of your list.
2. Rename this to say UOC_loading_background.large.PNG
3. Choose some other file to replace it with ... I hunted around and found pagetitlebkgd_wheat.GIF in %Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\WHEAT\
4. Opened the GIF file in MSPAINT.EXE and saved it as UOC_loading_background.PNG back to the MSILM2 folder
5. IISRESET
6. Deleted temporary browser files (you must remember to do this!)
7. Closed all browser windows (to be sure)
8. Opened a fresh browser and navigated back to the FIM home page!

From here I was able to pick up with the work I was doing at a far more productive rate.

Isn't it amazing how something so small can amount to so much when it comes to usability?

Here is the way to do that command line style and using a file that is already a .PNG (assumes WebServer Extensions installed on C drive) :

ren "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\MSILM2\UOC_loading_background.PNG"  large_*.*
copy "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\MSILM2\hrline.PNG"  "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\MSILM2\UOC_loading_background.PNG" 
IISRESET
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 8