TIP - Disable full row selection in Vista's Explorer

I've been using Vista since the official release (skipped the betas) and I've been trying to convince myself that some of the changes were made for the better.

In particular, I've made some effort to get used to the new file explorer but somethings have been harder to put up with. Anyway, little by little I "fix" some of the new features.

Today, I had it with the unnecessary full row selection. It makes right-clicking the directory listing background much harder. The fix isn't trivial. It involves setting a bunch of flags in the Explorer settings in the Registry. The good news is that you can get it in a .vbs file (I don't recommend downloading and executing scripts from the Internet, so open the file in a text editor and inspect what it does to make you feel comfortable with what it does). There are other handy utilities there as well (Update: site seems to have vanished. I updated the link to a copy of the script I had. I could not contact the author to verify if it was ok to redist the file, though).

Next up is changing the selected/hovered-over item's background color in Explorer (Aero). That choice of blue is way to pale for me. I've read that it cannot be changed easily because it comes from a bitmap embedded in the theme itself.

By the way, I'm mainly using Windows Server 2008 with Aero turned on and the fix works there too.