Color Scheme Customization

There are two ways to read the question: how to design a custom color scheme for office documents, or how to design a custom color scheme for office application windows. Both use the term "color scheme" to denote what colors are used in various parts of the window. I would like to know how to design a custom color scheme for the windows themselves (ie, set one color for the window title bar, possibly another for the window border, background, menu, etc). Office 2007 & 2010 both seem to hijack the normal appearance settings that windows uses, making it difficult for some people to distinquish where windows are when there are multiple overlapping windows. since the built-in color schemes do not provide high-contrast borders for the windows.

Wow, I had assumed that I just did not know how to do this.  I finally got around to looking and came across this thread.  Very disappointing.  I am a daily office user, am now in my 50's and  have a great deal of difficulty with the UI because of the color scheme.  I  prefer the old windows color style because of the contrast between the different segments of the screen.   With the current scheme some of the icons wash out and the screen segments run together - even in windows file explorer.

ok, I found a round-about way to change this...

Right click on the Desktop>Personalize:  Scroll down to "Basic and High Contrast Themes" and select any of the High Contrast themes (I suggest white if you'd like to keep it similar but get rid of that awful grey, grey-blue (blue), or dark grey (black) and revert back to the white-ish).

Once you select any of the High Contrast themes, click the Window Color icon on the bottom of the window and customize 'til your heart's content.  

Yes it's clunky, and yes it's a pain in the neck, but yes, it does allow you more than the 3 poor options available by default.

They don't care. and they do really stupid things with color like light blue or gray text on white. It is aesthetically pleasing but unreadable. MS is not alone in this. Human factors skills are not being taught to designers and programmers. A failing.

Exactly!!! I have had my Windows colour scheme set in the same way for over a decade, and now MS Office apps do not follow the colour scheme set for Windows. And as Laserray70 stated, it is hard to see what is the active window due to lack of contrast. I would like my Office applications to run with the same colour scheme that I have set Windows for over a decade. How do I do this?