>It is usually considered good practice to leave colors at the Windows default: this gives the user more control over his own computer.
>
>Hilmar.

Depends on the users - our company network does not allow individual modification of the Windows colour schemes - it's not that we're told not to modify the settings, we do not get the option given to us.

IMO the user should have the option of setting the colours for each application & not using a default setting, though that may be given as an option. I work on the basis that the user may want particular settings for my application & should not be forced to modify the overall settings for his PC to obtain the settings he wants.

There are occasions when the colours should not be up to the user. Some while ago, I was involved in producing a teletext application to run on a particular brand of (non-PC) computers, we wanted to get approval for the software from both company concerned & from the BBC, to aid marketing. We found that we were in the position where we could only get approval for one & not the other. The teletext system has a defined set of colours & to get approval from the BBC we had to meet the colour specification, unfortunately the colour set of the particular computer did not match one of the colours & the computer company would not give us approval if we didn't use the default colour set (despite modification only affecting the one application) - their view was that it should be up to the user to select what colours are displayed. Matching the colours to an internationally accepted standard was what we decided was the most important.