Fortunately, however, there are a couple of solutions you can try, and provided you follow the instructions carefully, you will get rid of the shadows and you can read the text again.

Method 1: Disable drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop

The shadows are enabled by default, and you can easily disable them, due to the fact that they are a customization option of Windows. To do this, follow the steps below.

NOTE: If this method doesn’t solve anything, open the Visual Effects again, and uncheck “Animate controls and elements inside windows” as well.

Method 2: Disable the shadows via the Registry Editor

Since the first method requires administrative privileges to open the Advanced System Settings, there is a workaround that disables the same shadows option, but via the Registry Editor. The Registry Editor only requires administrative privileges to write to locations that multiple users share, but you can edit the current user keys without such privileges. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Method 3: Disable transparent Start, taskbar and action center (Windows 10)

Since disabling Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop does nothing to remove the shadows for some users, there has been a solution that requires one more thing to be disabled.

Even though the drop shadows are meant to be a simple visual effect for Windows, for certain users they have caused problems with text readability on the desktop. However, all you need to do is follow the instructions in the methods written above, and you will get rid of the shadows in no time.

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