[W8-10] Changing Default System Highlight Colour Everywhere

This is information that can be found easily individually elsewhere, but I've ran into this annoying issue again, so I've made this thread purely for future reference in case I/or someone else needs to deal with it. Anways...

Long story short, MS have made changes to the way the highlight colour is defined between W7 and 8 through 10. If you use Classic Theme and change the highlight colour through "Display Properties" applet (this), only certain  program elements will respect the new highlight colour you've chosen.

In laymans: the changes only affect certain stuff, but context menus and the menu bar will ignore it. You'll need to change it elsewhere as well.

Open Regedit then go to this path: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors

Now the keys you want to change are: HotTrackingColor and Hilight.

Change each key value to the RGB colour you want, e.g I want teal, so that's 0 128 128.

Log out and log back in for the changes to take affect.

To stop it reverting on reboot/sleep/pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL, do the following:

anixx Avatar
Jun 8, 2016 12:36:33 GMT 1 anixx said:

Delete the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\DefaultColors

Source: www.winclassic.net/thread/43/windows-classic-theme-resident-programs

Thanks to Anixx  and others who worked this out, I'm just compiling it all for easy reference.