Battery Gauge color in Vista (Aero) (Pics)

[Steerpike]

Wanted to share my discovery as I found lots of confusion and mis-information on this topic when I googled it.

I was puzzled why my battery gauge icon in the tray was sometimes white, sometimes green (after upgrading to Vista, with the default Aero theme, with transparency on).

Here's what I noticed, in vista, with the default 'aero' theme:


But at other times, I noticed it was like this (5 minutes later, same session, etc):


Took me a while to figure this out, but, notice how the background task-bar is green in the first one, while it's black (dark gray) in the second one?

Looks like, a) Vista's taskbar changes color under certain circumstances, and b) the battery gauge changes color to try to 'adapt' to the background color - to offer contrast. Now, why does Vista taskbar change color? What I finally realized was, if at least ONE window is maximized, the task bar (and border, and title bar) turn dark gray. If no window is maximized, the taskbar is at it's more typical default color. You can maximize a window, then alt-tab to a window that is not maximized, but the task bar remains dark. I typically have 20 windows open at once, so this took me a long time to realize! I had just ONE maximized window that was triggering the dark task bar.

MOD EDIT: Picture warning added.

[ryengineer]

Greyed out battery icon in status tray on T61p