Oh right; I always forget that XP shipped with the insulting and horrible Fischer-Price motif enabled by default. The first thing I did was switch it to "classic" mode, which was the last revision of MS's GOOD windows GUI.
They also started obscuring the color-scheme editor, the eventual removal of which was a major blunder. By the time people finally realized that inverse color schemes are dumb, the color-scheme editor was gone and they had to wait for Microsoft and everyone else to implement hard-coded "dark mode" all over the place.
From Windows 3.1 through XP, I had simply created a "dark mode" color scheme at the system level; all properly-written applications inherited the system color scheme in Windows. Such an obvious, useful mechanism that Microsoft "forgot" and Apple to this day has never learned.
Even '90s Unix GUIs let you set up a color scheme, if I remember correctly.
7 started the regression in earnest, especially in the GUI.