I recently installed LabVIEW 2011, setting it up the same way as earlier versions of LabVIEW, in particular choosing the Modern Control Palette. To my surprise, when I opened a new Front Panel, it's background appeared much lighter than I expected, a significant contrast to all of my earlier VIs. At first, I thought I may have chosen the "Silver" controls by mistake, but this was not the case. All of my new VIs have Front Panels looking very different from the many VIs I've written using LabVIEW 7, 8, 2009, and 2010 -- I wanted LabVIEW 2011 VIs to have a consistent look with the many VIs that are already "out there".
Fortunately, there is a fix to change LabVIEW 2011 to produce "Old Standard" Front Panels (a "Thank You" to an NI engineer who helped me find this). Open LabVIEW 2011, go to Tools/Options, choose Environment, find Colors, uncheck "Use default colors", select "Front Panel", and
choose the User color box called "Classic Object" (it's toward the right, next to a bluish box). Note that the Classic Object has a Grey value of 179, while the "New Standard" Front Panel's Grey is 226, a pretty big difference. Incidently, it doesn't appear that any of the other Color default colors were changed.
Bob Schor
[To paraphrase Henry Higgins, "It doesn't matter if the VI actually does anything, as long as it Looks Good ..."]
