Sidebar background transparency

[Guest]

OK I may be daft, but for the life of me I cannot figure this out. I'm
running Vista Business, BTW.

My sidebar has a translucent black background to it, so it appears as a
black vertical ribbon behind all my gadgets. At the store today, I saw a
bunch of laptops for sale that had Vista running (one of them was the exact
HP laptop I own). Anyway, two or three of them had totally transparent (i.e.,
non-existent) backgrounds - it just looked like the gadgets themselves right
over the desktop.

The gadgets weren't removed from the sidebar and just placed there - you
could tell because they were the smaller, docked size and you also could see
the + and arrows of the sidebar at the top.

My question is, how the hell do I make my background transparent, too? I've
tried right-clicking in the sidebar and going to Personalise, but there's
nothing there. I've tried changing colour schemes, themes, etc., but no dice.
I've searched this group but have found no answers.

Anyone know?

 

[Guest]

Sidebar > Properties > untick side sidebar on top of other windows

 

[Lang Murphy]

Sidebar > Properties > untick side sidebar on top of other windows

<snip>

Yeah... that's does nothing here. I've got that unticked and SB still shows
gradient from dark (right) to light (left).

Lang

 

[Guest]

Sorry, Thats It, Folks
Regards
Bob J

<snip>

Yeah... that's does nothing here. I've got that unticked and SB still shows
gradient from dark (right) to light (left).

Lang