Registry Editor Color Change Not Working

Hi all! Hope you are doing well wherever you are in the world

I have a Dell XPS 15 running Windows 10 (version 21H1, build 19043.2130). I entered Registry Editor to change the 'HotTrackingColor' and 'Hilight' colors. I changed them to green because I wanted to be a bit more cyberpunk!

The colour change works fine until the computer goes to sleep/I close the lid of my laptop. When it wakes up again, the color is back to the default blue, despite the colours in Registry Editor showing as the changed, green values. I have tried accessing Registry Editor as Administrator but it does not fix things.. Restarting the computer does work, until I put computer to sleep and wake it up again, etc...

Can anyone please let me know why this might be happening, and how to get the changed color to show up every time?

Any help appreciated! Thank you

dalchina said:

Hi, I experienced the same thing with changing the background colour of system windows e.g. wordpad, notepad etc (not file explorer- that's different).

My workaround- which I documented long ago on tenforums is to
a. make the change
b. save the theme
c. automatically reapply that theme (scheduled task) on resume.

A long time ago, someone responded to that and gave another approach-

Ctrl-Alt-Delete Screen Color won't change with accent color

Thank you dalchina!

What I am referring to here however is not the theme colour, but both the click-and-drag highlight colour (the one that's for desktop, file explorer etc, seems to be 'hottrackingcolour') and the text highlight colour.

As mentioned, changing the colours of these values in Registry Editor works when I restart my computer, but whenever it's put to sleep and wakes back up it changes back to the default, despite the changed values showing up in RegEdit.. weird

dalchina said:

I quite realise you are not referring to the colour of the same part of a window.

I am suggesting the same solution may help you.

Do not get confused between creating a theme (file) and a theme colour. That may be your mistake.
I.e. you make the changes you want, then save that as a Windows theme:


This thread explains my workaround.
Regedit color choice doesn't survive sleep

The fix to stop colours being lost on resume by changing the registry is in my previous post.

Naturally I can't absolutely guarantee this will help in your case.

Now I understand !Thank you very much. I will give that a go.

Cheers :)