How do I fix bright scroll bars and selection colors in file explorer?

Question

I have an odd problem with file explorer in my windows 11 education edition system. I just domain joined my laptop to my DC last week and added my domain account to my laptop. I already had a local account set up on the laptop, and I have no issues there. However, on my domain account, the scroll bar, sort bar and selection color for the left panel are all very bright despite having dark mode selected. I prefer dark mode but would like my file explorer colors to be in all dark mode like it is on my local account. I don't get why my domain account has this problem, I didn't mess with group policy on the DC (yet) and the GP changes I made on the laptop don't have anything to do with visual styles.

I can't figure this problem out, I tried a google and Bing search, but I can't find anything relating to this and all the results are for "how to enable dark mode" which already know how to do and have done and isn't working right!

Please help me with this problem, it makes using dark mode on my domain account unusable because the file explorer scroll bar, sorting bar, and selection colors all bright background with light text (making it unreadable). I don't get why this problem exists specifically for dark mode and only on the domain account.

I tried to upload screenshots here, but it kept failing constantly, so I posted the screenshots to imgur https://imgur.com/a/ZwbRdZC ***moved from Windows / Windows 11 / Desktop, Start, and personalization / General***

Answer 1

Hi happyoutkast,

Welcome to the Microsoft community and thank you for asking your question in the community!

From your description, I understand that the account you are having the problem with is under domain control and that you are not having the problem with your local account set to dark mode, so it may be related to the domain management configuration file. I suggest you contact your IT administrator to change the configuration policy of your domain control to try to resolve the problem.

Please let me know if I have misunderstood. Tell us the results and we will get back to you as soon as possible. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Zhang Yang - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Answer 2

Hello and thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately it appears that I was not 100% clear in my last post. See, for my domain I AM the IT administrator. Granted, it's the first domain I set up for myself in a long time, is generally for personal use and educational purposes, and I never ran into this before in my previous domain environment that I ran ~20 years ago. The Domain controller is running in a Virtual Machine running in a windows 10 Education edition environment. As of right now I have a few computers joined to my AD domain, one WDS VM, my laptop I use for school running windows 11, and the windows 10 host.

So far, the laptop with windows 11 is the only one having issues, and is the only one I've noticed giving this problem (I haven't messed around with the domain account on the windows 10 computer much, yet). Since it's only affecting my domain account, my instructor at school suggested that it's probably a group policy setting causing this problem. The issue with that suggestion is this: have you ever gone though group policy trying to find just one specific setting? There's something like 564,654,564,319,825,314,915,782,555,136,524,999,765,244,138,755,264,658,135,724,135,345,790,016,988 group policy settings to go through! Without knowing exactly which setting to look for and knowing exactly where to go, finding the setting is nearly impossible, and Microsoft doesn't exactly make it easy. Please help!

Answer 3

Thank you for your reply, I understand from your description that you are a professional IT user and I will move your thread to the corresponding section.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

Have a nice day!

Zhang Yang

Answer 4

Hi happyoutkast,

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft Community Forums.

Your description is not particularly clear.

You can post a screenshot of the part you want to set to a darker color in a follow-up reply.

As well, how many devices are in your domain? Are the other devices working fine?

Is the only client you're having problems with WIN11? all others WIN10?

Best regards

Neuvi Jiang