Last Updated on June 19, 2023 by GrahamWalsh
Have you ever accidentally enabled high contrast mode and tried to revert it? Well usually it fails and reverts back to high contrast mode after a reboot. The only real option has been to re-image the device. Not the best solution. So over to Damian Lewis who worked with Microsoft support and finally got the resolution to the issue without a re-image.
One thing I’ve noticed is that turning high contrast mode on and off is working with the new UI. However, this is still relevant whilst you are on the original MTR UI.
Here are the steps to resolve the issue
- Login to the Admin Profile of the affected device
- Open a PowerShell App as the administrator
- Type the following to get the SID for the Skype User: wmic useraccount get name,sid
- Open & view the HighContrastEnabled registry in REGISTRY EDITOR following the path below: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SystemProtectedUserData\<SID_FOR_SKYPE_USER>\AnyoneRead\Colors\HighContrastEnabled
- View if value is set to 1
- If the value is set to, change value to 0
The registry cannot be modified from Admin access, so we need system access so follow the steps below:
- Download and install Psexec from Sysinternals (reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec)
- Open and extract the downloaded folder then copy PsExec onto your executable path
- Open cmd as administrator and run psexec.exe -i -s cmd.exe to change access to System
- Then change the value of HighContrastEnabled back to 0 following step 2.b
- Reboot the machine couple of times to test
Also published on Medium.