HELP! Start Menu Text Turned White!

[tamathumper]

Hi,

I've been playing around a lot with themes, using the MS Theme Generator V2 (MSTGV2) and the really cool FunnySnake PPC Theme Maker (FSPPCTM), and somewhere along the way, my start menu text got turned white!

I somehow got it back to black a while ago, but now it's done it again, and I've no way to tell how it gets turned on (or off), but it's really messing up the readability as you can imagine.

I know 2003 allows the start menu text to be modified, but neither MSTGV2 or FSPPCTM allow that, so it's not something I think I did by mistake when generating themes...

Is it possibly a bug in the theme switcher that comes with MSTGV2? Or have I truly done something stupid?

Tamathumper...

[tamathumper]

Well, after some digging and registry trial-and-error (I love XReg), I at least found the registry entry that is getting modified...

All of the color settings appear to be under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Color

I noticed several that were set to "FF FF FF 00" (they all have a pair of trailing zeros), so I started changing them to "00 00 00 00". The first one in the list, "9", changed the color of the Navigation Bar Text, and the second one in the list "39", changed the color of the Start Menu Text.

So, at least I have my menu text back to black, now if I can just find the rogue app that is changing it in the first place! Might be FreeSnake, but I'm not certain yet, it could be the Today Theme Switcher.

[tamathumper]

The "Spiral" theme that comes with the unit by default turns the Start Menu text white. None of the other themes generated by MS Theme Generator V2 have the smarts to modify the registry sub-key "39", so they leave it white... One would think that the default "Dell" scheme that also comes with the unit would turn the text back to black, but I don't believe that it does.

So, for now I have taken "Spiral" out of the rotation, and that has solved the problem.