How to increase contrast of Windows 7 Menu Item highlight

You're talking about the "hot tracking color", and it's annoying to me as well. For some reason, you cannot change it in Windows 7, and MS chose to make it a near undetectable color.

I am not certain, but I think that this is related to another answer a gave a couple of hours ago, over here.

If I am right, you need to open the shellstyle.dll theme file with XN Resource Editor and find the offending light blue .png graphic file and then replace it with one of your desired hue.

This can be changed using a registry hack.

From a command prompt type "regedit" In the registry editor window find the following key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors\HotTrackingColor

The color format is: RRR GGG BBB

The range of each field is 0-255.

Black: 0 0 0

Bright Red: 255 0 0

Bright Blue: 0 0 255

Gray: 128 128 128

White: 255 255 255