THANK YOU for posting a reply. I've still wondered about this constantly. For now I have the window color as white, window/message text as black, and the 3D objects as 50% grey so it's all mediocre readability at least, and doesn't mess up coloring in Opera or Word. Still it's annoying.

I unfortunately could not find 3DCC reliably in 30 seconds or less, lol, soo... do you have a link to its website or something? Sorry I've just got work I'm supposed to be doing and I can't spend very long looking for stuff; besides I've had enough mental activity for today

Have you tried 3DCC? I think either it or some other program whose name I can't remember (long time since I have used a Windoze) allows you to access and change color to parts of the Windoze interface that you can't access from the normal Windoze display properties control panel.

lol, when google searching for this, I was like "YES! Win9x window text / message text! someone knows what I'm talking about!"

and then I was redirected to my own question. facepalm.

Yeah, you're right, it's certainly less readable without the shadow on 9x. Just looks nicer.

But really, did anyone ever make a patch for the display.cpl, so you can set separate text colors for the secondary color in Message Box (shows up as Message Text) and the secondary color in "Window" (shows up as Window Text)?

Otherwise, any theme that's like 50% grey or darker works terribly. And I have a pretty cool looking dark theme on my laptop.

Or at least - can I disable the window settings for most applications? (outside of Explorer)? Like make it so in Word the window background is still white, so when I'm working on a paper I don't have a grey background with white text? (other than background fill -> white)

I never understood why people used those. It makes the icon captions harder to read depending on your background.

That's actually one of the things that annoys me about Windows 7. You can't turn off the transparent icon background. You can turn off drop shadows, but that doesn't bring back the solid background color.

There's at least one third party utility (that I know of) for this, but unfortunately, it doesn't work with Aero.

One thing that always frustrated me about Windows 95/98 is that if you ever try to make a dark theme, it never actually works, and screws up other applications (Opera, Word, etc.)

Why is this? Because the "message text" in the example is linked to the "Window text". This kind of ruins the idea of a dark grey color for the 3D Objects, incl. message boxes, because you have to make the window color darker and the window text lighter for this to work.

I know this is a really small thing but it's really annoying, cause Win98 looks so cool in dark grey, but I can't use a dark window color without messing up the work I have to do in Word...

Has anyone ever made a fix for this? I mean, someone was insane enough to make a transparent icon subtitle patch (which I use, lol), so...

has anyone else even noticed this? it still applies if you use the Windows Classic theme in XP.