>My system tray has lost almost all its color. Not all color is gone, but most is, the icons appear grayish now, like a color photo that has a bad light exposure. Even the tray background color is also faded to grayish (when a background color other than gray is used, it still appears grayish), so it's the entire tray that's bad, really.

After further analysis, I am suspecting my monitor is going south, not the system tray. The color loss begins at the lower left corner, in the system tray, where it's most obvious, but also can be seen faintly spreading north up the screen into application taskbars now.

I have never heard of anything like this, but will guess this is a straight monitor failure problem, as in "almost time to replace it."