From your post I can tell you are familiar with Windowblinds which a skin would accomplish this.
In SkinStudio, you simply change the graphic for this if I am not mistaken.
Sorry, I should have mentioned, I would like to achieve this while still using the "Automatically pick an accent color from my background" option in Windows' colour settings, which lets the taskbar and window title bars change colour as your desktop background image changes.
So basically I want to keep everything default, but just make the orange alert colour much brighter.
Maybe I'm asking for too much; but I figured that dull orange colour must come from somewhere, right? So I figured if it's hard-coded somewhere perhaps it could be changed in isolation without affecting anything else.