For some reason my desktop icons now have a shaded blue background behind where the name appears. Does anybody know how I can fix this?

Here's a screenshot of my desktop, the icons are on the left-hand side of the screen.

Click to view attachment

Those icon text "boxes" are blue because you got blue desktop under wallpaper. You can change boxes to transparent by right clicking My computer, selecting Properties, then go to Advanced tab. Click "Settings" on Performance area and check "Use Drop Shadows for Icon Labels". Hit OK and OK.

Thank you very much, I tried what you said and it worked just fine. I don't know how it ever got changed before, but, transparent is what I wanted. Thanks again.

If your on an lcd monitor you can make it look even better by turning on clear type. Go to your desktop and right click>properties>appearance>effects>in the second drop down box choose clear type.

I don't like clear type, makes the text look slightly blurry to me.

Same here, i don't like it either.

Thanks rridgely, that worked nicely too. I think it gives it a cleaner look. I'm using the small icons as well, which take up less room.

This little trick does something else as well.

The only thing I prefer in IE7 over Firefox, is the quality of the font or text, whatever.

I've tried changing to different fonts, sizes, etc etc, to no avail.

Selecting clear type, as above, makes Firefox text display identical to IE7.

Magic.

Thats because IE7 has Cleartype enabled by default (one of the first things I turned off), Firefox respects the system default font settings.

I wish I'd known about this months ago.

The appearance of all text, offline or on is vastly improved with Cleartype.

But of course, it's all subjective, and it works for me.

I think it has a lot to do with your monitor too. I've always thought clear type looked good on my pcs with lcd monitors but not so great with a crt.

Well I'll be danged.

Was wondering why my print looked crappy in all my virtual machine XP installs compared to Vista and that was why.

Thanks rridgely!

I've always thought clear types default settings were pretty good but you can also tune them a little with this power toy:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleart...uner/Step1.aspx
(you have to be using IE to use that site. There is also a downloadable one on the power toys site).