The new release by GOG of the vintage game Timelapse changes the color scheme of how my windows appear. Not the operating system but how individual windows display their colors like the title bar and background. What happens is after exiting the game the window area and any fields that you can type in are no longer white but black. In Windows XP and before it was easy to change the color scheme of how a window appears by just right clicking the Desktop But I am using Windows 7 and can't find out how to do it. I can't function as I can't read anything as the text is black and also the background. It takes a couple of reboots to bring it back to normal. I wouldn't mind the game making those changes if I can easily get into that Display like I use to do. I can't even get back into the game as the Save game menus background also turns black and the text which is black can't be seen. Hope I explained that correctly. Any ideas of how to get back to that?

Right-click the desktop where there is no shortcut.
Choose "Personalize" in the context menu
There should be a "Window Color" icon at the bottom of the screen.

If for some reason that doesn't work, you can try reinstalling a theme.

Hi Jenny100

Thank you for your help. Followed those instructions but, unless I missed something, that changes only the color of the header in the window but not the body or background of the text window. In other words everything except the color of the header would be black which normally is white.

Did you try reinstalling a theme?
That should reset everything to a color scheme with legible windows.

Or are you talking about the contents of the Window rather than the menu bar?

Check here
https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/windows-7-and-8-changing-colours/

I'm curious whether anyone else has this problem.

At the bottom of the Personalize do you have a High resolution section... two of them show a white area in the text area.

OK, try this...

Right-click the desktop where there is no shortcut.
Choose "Personalize" in the context menu
Select "Window Color" icon at the bottom of the screen.
Click "Advanced appearance settings..."

That should get you the familiar old interface from XP and earlier, and you probably know what to do from there.

Thanks Winfrey for the suggestions and thanks Jenny100 now that is what I remember the display settings looked like. I will have to wait until after I play the game to see if this will work. I do remember this happening many years ago with windows 95 or 98 with a game or 2 although I can't remember which game or even if it was Timelapse. But then all I had to do was right click the desktop to get to that classic display changing menu. Now I know where it is. I will get back with you later when I get back into the game. The game looks good but I remember it looking a bit better on the old CRT Monitors.

I don't remember it happening with Timelapse.
But I do remember Morpheus had something similar, only with Morpheus it was the game that suffered if your text background was something other than white.
There was a patch to fix it ***here***, but the workaround was to change your text background to white.

It wouldn't surprise me if other games were affected.

Thanks all, Well getting into the "Advanced Appearance Settings" and changing a few things have worked out as I am not experiencing the same problem but I don't see a button to click for returning the settings to the Default settings.

Do you see a theme called "Windows 7" in the list of themes?
See if that's it.

Hi Jenny

Thanks, I will try that once I finish the game and want to revert everything I did back to what it was.

Good info to know.

Thanks!

Reading this was quite a throwback

I remember this happening constantly when I was on Windows 95 and 98, and played older games. It really surprises me that it still can happen with Windows 7.