Starting with Windows 10 version 20H2, Microsoft changed the way some of the smaller objects appear on a Windows desktop. For example, the title bar color started appearing white which was different than the earlier versions. The highlighting color on a Windows also became white. These changes keep coming with every major update of the operating system. But these small changes could make some Windows users uncomfortable as they have got used to the previous colors.
If you are also one of these Windows users who really became accustomed to the older grey color that appeared when right-click context menus were selected, then there is a workaround available for you. There is an open-source tool called ContextMenuNormalizer which is able to change the context menu highlight color instantly. This program runs and closes after patching the Windows memory where the color value is stored. This tool works for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Because of this memory-patching behavior of ContextMenuNormalizer, this tool can be identified as malicious by some antivirus software. But you can check the downloaded ContextMenuNormalizer files using VirusTotal and get an idea about how other top antivirus products detect it.
Even though this tool does not need to be installed on your Windows PC and can be run to make the changes, we can set it to be run automatically at Windows logon. For making it auto-start with Windows, we can use the batch script that comes with the downloaded ZIP archive.
In order to make it auto-run with Windows, we can double-click on install.cmd and it will make changes to the Windows registry. Next time when you start Windows PC, it will automatically patch the memory to make the context-menu highlight color turn grey once again. Similarly, it offers another batch script file uninstall.cmd which can be used to remove these auto-run entries from the registry.
You can download ContextMenuNormalizer from https://github.com/krlvm/ContextMenuNormalizer.