I have been using OpenVPN Server as my go to VPN Server for years. It has been the de-facto solution for any of my clients that have ever had a VPN requirement. I really do love OpenVPN, however OpenVPN GUI is a different story. While the actual form and function of the software is outstanding (no complaints at all!), the look and feel is absolutely horrible. One thing I have noticed over the years is how quickly a user will dismiss a product based on looks alone. Here in lies the problem that I have with OpenVPN GUI. The tray icon is for lack of a better word just plain ugly. The icon is similar to the networking icon in Windows XP. This was fine when Windows XP was the predominant operating system of choice, but that was a long time ago. About two years ago I was deploying OpenVPN for one of my customers and while installing the OpenVPN GUI client for the customer I was asked with a perplexed look on their face,
Are you sure that is going to work?
At that moment I realized how an awesome software like OpenVPN / OpenVPN GUI could immediately loose credibility in the end users eyes based on its looks alone. It was time for me to take action. So the hunt began to find a better solution. After trying to find another client that just looked better, I ultimately settled on simply modifying the look of OpenVPN GUI itself. The solution was simple, I headed to OpenVPN’s site and grabbed a high resolution icon that I opened in Paint.NET. Once there, I created two more high resolution images, one for connecting and another for connected. Once the .png’s were created I opened the openvpn-gui.exe file with Resource Hacker and proceeded to replace the icon group. Below is the original icon set on the left, with the updated icon set on the right.
Original Idle Icon 
New Idle Icon 
Connecting 
Connecting 
Connected 
Connected 
In my humble opinion, this is a night and day difference. As you can see on the right, we now have a clean set of icons for OpenVPN GUI that are more along the lines of Windows 7/8 theming guidelines. OpenVPN GUI version 5 with the new icon set compiled into it is available below. Included in the download is both x86 and x64 versions of the client. To use the client, simply rename the appropriate file for your system to “openvpn-gui.exe” and overwrite your existing executable.
Custom OpenVPN-GUI Download
Very interesting, thank you
I have been wondering about OpenVPN’s super ugly icon for years and I just found this. Damn this is nice!
A much needed improvement for OpenVPN. I was satisfied with the quality of the standard OpenVPN GUI but the Icon set indeed looked dated and “tacky”. I had actually experimented with using another management package, but it was troublesome and not dependable. So I changed back to the package incorporated GUI. In my opinion the updated Icon set resolved the appearance issues. Thank You very much, I have switched all my clients to your Icon set!
Thanks for your kind words Greg
Looks better indeed, but it’s a bit fuzzy. Try cleaning up your lines and you will have improve it even more..