Fin­ding the elu­sive per­fect black theme for win­dows XP is nigh impos­si­ble. The thwar­ted erro­neous or incon­sis­tent use of SYS­CO­LORs throughout appli­ca­tions ine­vi­tably leads to a mix mash of black on grey (Fire­fox says grey can only be spe­lled gray, silly thing), black on black, url-blue on black or many other una­voi­da­ble clashes that make using that par­ti­cu­lar pro­gram impos­si­ble or pain­ful. Whether it be unchan­gea­ble back­ground whi­tes with white text or the fixed black font on the new dark-grey 3D win­dows there’s always a rea­son to switch back to the eye-ball pene­tra­ting white the­mes. Even Mic­ro­soft appli­ca­tions lay foul to this pro­blem — you’d expect pro­per SYSCOLOR usage here at least:

MSN & Microsoft’s Tweak UI

No mat­ter what you do, that black text can­not be fixed, no mat­ter what you do that blue hea­der and frame in MSN can­not be fixed — no tweak will suf­fice. All black the­mes face these pro­blems. The only way of fixing such issues I ima­gine is to apply a cus­tom visual style to each pro­ble­ma­tic appli­ca­tion and the only pro­gram that allows this, as far as I am aware is Win­dow­Blinds, which I shud­der to use as I like my sys­tem resour­ces. This pro­blem extends to brow­sers whe­rein web-pages adopt the default color sche­mes; brow­sing under the guise of black­ness you become aware of the sites that assume ever­yone uses a black on white setup and the pro­blems in crea­ting an incom­plete or ill-defined CSS sty­lesheet. For exam­ple, defi­ning the back­grounds as white but lea­ving the default text, defi­ning text-color within an input box but not its back­ground color, visa versa, etc. In IE this can­not be fixed remo­tely and your theme beco­mes abso­lu­tely impos­si­ble to tolerate:

But in Fire­fox this pro­blem can be fixed by ove­rri­ding default theme values via the UserContent.css file, found here:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILE\chrome
for a stan­dard ins­ta­lla­tion. I added these settings:

Which chan­ges the page (and others that rely on default sche­mes) to look like this:

A sig­ni­fi­cant and usa­ble impro­ve­ment that allows for an impro­ved and enjo­ya­ble brow­ser expe­rience. Note: It seems Fire­fox defi­nes text-colour default to black and igno­res the the­mes value, so no chan­ges have to be made here. To have a brow­ser wor­king within a black theme beco­mes a sig­ni­fi­cant bene­fit and the pro­blems and woes of the few assor­ted clashes elsewhere become tole­ra­ble. Now a beau­ti­ful black theme such as Inverso-Reborn-Balanced can be used func­tio­nally in day to day life without just loo­king pretty (screenshot sho­wing Foo­bar, Explo­rer and Notepad):

If only more appli­ca­tions allo­wed com­plete CSS re-styling of their user interface.