Best place/forum for people with in depth windows knowledge?

I have a doozy of an issue that 20 years of enthusiast(ism?) hasnt been able to rectify. The below is a copy/paste from another forum I posted on with a grand total of 0 replies thus far. Need all the help I can get.

So years of images. Nothing has ever failed me. I just got rid of them all to start fresh after imaging over to a new/larger SSD.

Of course, coincidentally (maybe) at that point, I began having major color issues and had no previous image to restore to cause i'm an idiot.

Take note of the "years of images" part. This pc is set up in such a way, that i'd never be able to replace even half of it - so if i dont keep this image rolling for the rest of my days, i might need lithium

Now ive always used "auto select color from my background" and its now failing me spectacularly. I'm not sure what got corrupted or unsync'd where, hence why I'm here.

If I toggle auto-select color off, then on. It will select the proper color everywhere and persist for exactly 1 restart. The second restart, and my alt+ctrl+del & my restarting screen, both go to what appears to be the default blue. (everything in windows still retains proper accent color ironically enough).

I tried to toggle off "auto" and select a color manually. This color also persists properly for a restart. After which point, it goes to a flourescent green instead of blue #boggle.

Now my desktop background is green, and auto select chooses a proper medium-dark green to pair it with. Where the blue comes from, or the flourescent green when auto select is off and I select a close shade manually - is beyond me.

I remember this happening years ago, many windows versions ago, and I ended up needing to restore to fix it... but I cant restore now so I hope someone with deeper know-how chimes in.

Ive tried sfc which is clean. dism which is also clean. Of course my windows and drivers are all kosher cause im an ocd enthusiast. Turned sync off and cleared cloud data, same behavior. Tried turning sync on, and syncing to my other pc which I set with the same background/color to try and "push" it to this pc. Same behavior.

I even tried the reg files in this post https://www.tenforums.com/customiza...lor-wont-change-accent-color.html#post1604583

I'm ocd to the point that i'll suffer on the deepest level if my beloved pc changes colors on me every restart till the end of time >.<

Thanks for reading my nyt worst seller

worth noting, behavior presents itself even with a log off/log on. Restart not necessary (if that helps anyone)

also updating windows version (made a backup and went insider ring) doesnt help.

nor did making my account local which i believe removes sync as potentially being part of the equation.

just added a new user - it worked as intended. So its specific to my user profile ,which was probably obvious.

anybody know where I can post that has people with super developer/programmer/windows internals types? Isnt superuser or some such good for that kinda thing?

do you have other machines with the same account functioning correctly?

I know this isn't the answer you are looking for and you allude to not wanting to do it, but in all my years of tech support, nothing has ever beat a good ol' reformat and reinstall. For time invested and stress level. Spend a week digging for a fix or a day backing up...

Yea, my machine right next to it is functioning correctly. And as per my former post - I was able to create a new account on the "malfunctioning" pc and it worked. So its either a user profile and/or registry issue tied to this pc.

A reformat literally isnt possible. Sure i can back up all my media, hell all my stuff IS backed up more or less. But I have dozens if not hundreds of pieces of software installed and configured. Things organized a certain way. A ton of registry edits and tweaks for my context menu etc.

This has been manicured to fit "me" for years now.

I'll live with my colors changing before I reformatted Its the only problem with the pc and its wholly aesthetic. Still its my pride and joy, and im OCD as hell >.< And who knows, perhaps it could be tied to something else not so aesthetic that hasnt presented itself yet, iunno.

I know someone will pop up eventually that knows what files/entries control these things directly and either allow an edit, or a replacement from someone elses good copy persay.

If its even a bad or corrupt file. I have no idea what SFC or DISM covers in their entirety, but theyre sure finding nada.

Thank you for the reply though I take what i can get

Do you have a list of registry tweak and policy you tinkered with ?
Also, the previous poster asked if you had another machine with the same account probably asking if yours is linked to a Microsoft account so you can compare behavior.

yea, theyre all on same MS account. Its not tied to the account itself, its a local issue. The tweaks are nothing color related. These are things that have been in place for years. Largely context menu stuff like I was saying. Take ownership and right click open admin command prompt etc.

no changes at current except for restoring a macrium image over to a larger ssd and enlarging the partition. I think at some point I may have toggled sync on or off on other pc's or moved a flash drive that I pulled my wallpapers off of (before theyre saved locally in the list of 5 to swap between)

To that end - i THINK i may be onto something. Instead of using those 5 in my list to swap between and test, I grabbed some new ones fresh and repopulated the list. They SEEM to be holding their color, but I havent had the heart to swap back to the original one(s) as i dont have the heart to be potentially disappointed yet

I'll be doing so at some point today, so ill post back if it ended up being some kinda corruption with the pre saved/queued backgrounds after the image restoration or flash disk move.

some stress and some days in, heres to hoping. Its incredible how much something like that can bother you. Makes one wonder lol.

So... after some more trial and error - it seems to be that ONE wallpaper. Its somehow corrupt somewhere within windows. I change to another copy of it, in a different color (that i use for another pc) and it holds and accents properly. I change back to the green one, and poof - goes ham. So I renamed it thinking it would cache a new copy wherever windows does these things. Nope, same behavior.

Odd.

The easy fix at this point seems to simply find and pick a new wallpaper. Still i'd like to resolve the root of the issue and learn something in the process. Does anyone know where windows cache's/queue's/saves the 5 wallpapers you see in your recently changed wallpapers list under settings>personalization>background? Where those exact 5 are saved at? I'd like to remove em at the source and try, this way i could ascertain whether its that local save, or the initial wallpaper itself.

(im leaning on the former as the file itself seems to work proper on other pc's)

well redownloaded the wallpapers, changed the names and deleted the history which is located at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpapers

still, doesnt work properly with THAT specific wallpaper on THIS pc.

Weirdest ever, dont know where to go from here with that whole thing.

LOL OKAY - even CRAZIER.

I decided to go with a solid green background, till I can find something else suitable. If you recall my previous background was predominantly green and thus the accent color should have been green.

Seems any background that should be selecting green as the accent, picks blue? The hell....

EDIT - not sure if its intended behavior (cant test atm) but seems all solid colors choose blue as the background/accent color.

SO - either thats the intended behavior and my one specific wallpaper is made in such a way that its "actually" a solid color undernearth (or being picked up as such) or this pc is just broken in said aspect

Ironicially I have the same exact background (at least to the eye) in different colors, and they work properly. The green one is either made differently... or who the hell knows at this point.

Taking all suggestions and ideas

EDIT2 - ok, so seems thats the default behavior. Solid background color = blue accent.

So i surmise that somehow that ONE wallpaper is being picked up as such for some reason on this pc. Maybe because I have dual monitors, maybe because the accessory display I keep as a blank black background and for some reason its taking that into the equation.

I did test with even using the same baackground on both monitors (as i hypothesized the former might be the case) but it made no difference.

Above my paygrade now.

seems the only solution I have is finding a different wallpaper for all 3 pc's (going back to my OCD'ness they need to match to some degree. One is an nvidia card so i go green. one is amd card so i go red. One is intel integrated so i go blue. Welcome to the constraints of an obsessive compulsive sob ;p)

klepp0906 said:

just added a new user - it worked as intended. So its specific to my user profile ,which was probably obvious.

anybody know where I can post that has people with super developer/programmer/windows internals types? Isnt superuser or some such good for that kinda thing?

Click to expand...

It appears that your local user account was corrupted, simple as that. You seem to be overthinking it but hey, don't we all from time to time.

why dont you just manually set you accent colour?

You can consider yourself very lucky if some color accent is your problem with Windows lol. In my virtual windows installation the whole 'personalization' tab is corrupt. The button graphics are corrupt, which is kind of ironic.

Have you tried using USMT onto a new user account to see if it displays the same behavior?