It wasn't just chrome in Vista. The taskbar was translucent, large parts of the Start menu were translucent, window titles were translucent (including minimize/

It wasn't just chrome in Vista. The taskbar was translucent, large parts of the Start menu were translucent, window titles were translucent (including minimize/maximize/close buttons). And controls and toolbars were bleeding into the chrome part of windows, so while the widgets themselves were opaque, they were placed on translucent background. And for some apps they went all in, e.g. Media Player. Here's a random screenshot from image search: https://live.staticflickr.com/90/245324637_1e615ef573_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/90/245324637_1e615ef573_b.jpg I remember going into settings and turning it all off because of how annoying it was. But then Win7 came and turned up the frosted glass effect throughout, and that largely fixed all the outstanding issues.