A Windows 3.1 User Set Every Color in Control Panel to Black, Then Called Support About a Blank Screen
Raymond Chen tells the Windows 3.1 support case of a customer who set every system color to black for a goth theme. Windows started, the logo went away, and nothing could be seen. Chen guesses the fix was a trip to MS-DOS and win.ini.
The call came in the way a lot of them still do. Per Chen, the customer “turned on the computer, and Windows started up, but when the logo went away, all they saw was a blank screen.”
Today that would get filed as a “black screen” bug. Back then it took a support engineer asking questions until the picture came together.
Here’s what the engineer pieced together, in Chen’s words: “It turned out that this customer really liked the color black, so they decided to set up a goth theme.”
And they meant it. Wallpaper, black. Title bars, black. Buttons, black. Window background, black. Window text, black. “Every possible color you could pick in the Colors control panel was set to black.”
Windows drew every window, title and line of text in the colors it was given.
The trouble is getting back out. Chen puts it plainly: “Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out because you can’t see anything.” The control panel you’d use to undo it is drawn in the same colors.
Chen’s list of modern causes reads like a whodunit. A broken video driver. A compositor that hands the screen nothing but black pixels. Nobody drawing at all, or “the person who normally draws stuff is hung.”
The win.ini fix is Chen’s guess, and the support engineer’s actual answer never made it into the story. What did they tell a customer who loved black that much, once the colors came back gray?
