I have...I've gone from 0%-100% on every single setting and every comibination of them...nothing worked...I don't think I have CRT because the comp monitor is meant for the almost non existant windows ME (Millenium Edition) and the comp runs on XP so that may be another thing that makes it suck ass.
I had problems with a monitor that was becoming too dark. It was a CRT, and it was dieing (and later did actually die).
CRT:
LCD
I enjoyed the purple and white one, also black and red is really, REALLY overused. It's like red and white, or orange and black. I don't know, maybe it's just personal taste.
It is personal taste, because as spec said, every combination that looks good, has been done a million times over. There are only so many color combinations possible, and most of the ones that look good have been used somewhere, so unless you can come up with a color combination that looks good and HASN'T been used, this is the best we're gonna get.
Light on dark is hard to read; that's why everything is pretty much light gray on dark gray with very little light gray on black (mostly with navigational things). I played with the contrast for about a half hour before I found the best balance.
Quite true. Though my IDE settings for assembly programming were generally something like medium gray over black, with highlights in bright green, blues, purples reds, maroons and such for making things very separated, I would definitely not set my entire system to that.