:^/ I'm sure Vista has ways of doing what you're suggesting, but I have little experience with it.  Instead, I'll just suggest that this thread would have been better if it had been made in the Operating System forum, where all of the Vista experts are.  This is the Laptop General Hardware forum.

I don't know how to make them open in the same format each time (it annoys me as well), but you might be able to change the text/background colour, in Appearance Settings?

Right-click on the desktop, and select Personalize --> Window Color and Appearance, and at the bottom of the window is an option to 'Open classic appearance...'.

That will open a new, smaller window. 

Click on 'Advanced', and you'll see a host of different options in the style seen in XP, one of which should allow you to change the options you're wanting to change?

I used to do it in XP, by choosing a creamy background colour (i.e. the one which shows as black in the new window), then changing the message text font/colour to whatever I wanted to use.

So start with those... but you may just have to experiment, to find out exactly what each specific options changes?