I just came across a very frustrating issue that took me far longer to solve than it should. A user came to me because Office 2007 applications had no color. What I saw when I checked was that they were displayed in what appeared to be 8 bit color regardless of the color depth set on the display. Websites also when viewed in IE or FF were missing colors or images. I tried deleting registry keys for Office to attempt to reset any user modified settings to no avail. I downloaded Chrome in an attempt to check if it was related to some shared rendering library between the other two. What I found was that Chrome looked fine!
Bewildered and frustrated I frantically searched Google and found somewhere (sorry, I didn't save the link) a mention about High Contrast Mode. Now I'm familiar with high contrast color schemes, and in fact I double checked the color scheme and reset it to Windows Classic early in the process. What I was unfamiliar with is the Accessibility Options control panel setting "High Contrast Mode". It just so happens that this had been turned on. It appears that Office, IE, and FF were all attempting to honor this setting and make the computer more accessible by displaying everything in a low color high contrast mode. For whatever reason Chrome ignores this setting.
Unchecking that box fixed the problem across all affected applications.
