Help getting ugly highlights off desktop Icons

That's weird. Do you press Apply afterwards? Or do you just press OK?
Did you try Control Panel>System>Advanced>Performance and choose adjust for best appearence?

I had the same problem with a few wallpapers I had made myself and downloaded, the problem was that they were in PNG format. I converted them to JPEG and now the icon text displays properly.

check if your color depth is 16 bit and change it to 32 bit.

maybe try a different icon set theme

change the color in the desktop option where you change your background image. there''s also a tweak to make icon highlight transparent.

Maybe you can find you to do it manually with regedit.

Always wondered who spread that rumor.
There is one difference between OK and Apply: The first closes the window, the second one doesn't. That's it. Anyone who tells you different has either bought into the myth, or used an application written by a programmer that bought into the myth. Microsoft applications, including Windows, have absolutely no requirement to hit Apply first. No one I've challenged to prove me wrong has been able to do so, but of course they all have "this one time..." stories.

There are multiple causes for the OP's issue. The most common fix: right-click the Desktop, go to Arrange By, and clear the checkbox next to "Lock Web Items on Desktop". Another possibility is that you have some sort of web item that you can't see. Right-click the desktop and go to Properties. Go to the Desktop tab. Click Customize. Go to the Web tab. Make sure nothing here is checked. OK all the way out. You don't have to hit Apply first if you don't want to (I tested it). If the problem persists, check one of the items, OK out, then go back in, uncheck them, then go all the way out. If you're still having a problem, post back and I'll look up some of the less common reasons.

You cannot run active desktop items and have transparent backgrounds on your icons at the same time. I don't know what the reasoning is.

Try changing your home adress in internet explorer and press ok and see if it changes. When you press the home button you will still go to the previous adress.

Not for me, it didn't, and never has. This is something I do regularly as Dell puts their homepage on all their machines. That in itself is OK. The problem is, that we sell all these Dell PCs to our clients, then set them up for remote access through RDP. When you connect to a client's machine and need to get on the Internet, the rotating images on the Dell homepage pretty much freeze the connection. So, during the config phase on all client PCs, I go into Internet options, change the homepage, click OK, and all is well.

For giggles, I just reset my homepage on this one only using OK. I clicked the home button, and I'm at the page I set.

I have seriously never had a problem doing this, except on a couple of stupidly coded applications, usually by Visual Basic programmers. For C/C++ coders, we almost always use one code set for both the OK and Apply button, but at the very end we put in another check to see if it was the OK button that was pressed, and if so we send a WM_CLOSE. Otherwise we just gray out the Apply button and end the routine. This is the Microsoft convention, and I believe it was even published somewhere that this is what they expect for their consistency guidelines (I.E. including File, Edit, Help menus, etc.).