Cannot remove misleading 'active window' indicator line on taskbar, even setting the colour in the registry is ignored if it's similar to the taskbar

Question

I've just upgraded to windows 10 from 7, and am having an issue which seems to have plagued a lot of people over the years, but for which I can't find any information about whether there's a fix now, and it's making it very difficult for me to work.

On the taskbar, every single application has a glowing bar under the title, which is making it very difficult for me to differentiate which is the active window at a glance. This is a major problem when trying to do any work in multiple windows where you need to frequently jump back and forth, e.g. having 2 identically named folders where you are comparing the file contents in each, and need to know which version you are currently in to not make mistakes of accidentally returning to the current folder when trying to switch.

So far I've been able to use the registry to highlight the active window a bit more which definitely helps. I've tried setting the line colour to be darker to match the taskbar and not stand out as much to indicate being the active window, but at some point the luminosity of the colour is ignored if it's too dark or similar to the taskbar, and the hue is kept while the luminosity is set back up to a capped minimum, like the developers really worked against people being able to hide this bar for some reason?

I've included a picture of what I'm talking about. While the picture is scaled down it's not so noticeable, but if you open the picture in fullscreen mode in an image viewer of your choice, or just open it in a new tab and hit f11 in a browser on a 1080p monitor, you should be able to see the lines I'm talking about and how bright and distracting they are once you're trying to do any work in multiple windows where you need to frequently jump back and forth and need to identify the active window at a glance. While you can't reduce their contrast against the taskbar they also just look kind of ugly.

https://i.imgur.com/3Vy4LrV.png

Answer 1

There is nothing untoward in the image you uploaded