Aero Adjuster

Aero Adjuster is a lightweight and portable software utility that borrows some features from Windows 8 for Windows 7. It can automatically adjust the taskbar color to the current wallpaper, along with other aspects.
The tool contains intuitive options that can be easily figured out by users, including those with little or no previous experience in desktop customization software.

Portability advantages

As there is no installation involved, you can extract the program files to any part of the hard disk and just click the executable to run. There is also the possibility to save Aero Adjuster to a USB flash disk or similar storage unit, in order to launch it on any PC effortlessly and without previous installers.
An important factor worth taking into account is that the Windows registry does not get updated with new entries, and no extra files are created on the disk, thus leaving no traces behind after its removal.

Accessibility via the system tray area

At startup, Aero Adjuster creates an icon in the system tray area, whose context menu you can bring up to fiddle with settings. As previously mentioned, the tool can automatically set the taskbar color to match the current wallpaper.
In addition, it can invert the color and tweak the brightness level, ignore non-colors (black, white and grey), enable color transitions (e.g. linear, ease in, custom), as well as restore the original Aero color.

Evaluation and conclusion

Unfortunately, the tool popped up multiple errors in our evaluation and crashed, and sometimes it became unresponsive to commands. Considering it's such a small app, it uses significant CPU (RAM consumption is low). It seems that Aero Adjuster has some compatibility issues with the operating system. Otherwise, it features some interesting options for tweaking the Windows 7 taskbar.