How can I make them less intrusive to my eyes?

I don't like all those vertical lines showing the indents - they make the code hard to read. Somehow in the last couple of days they started appearing. Previously, there were faint lines that showed, but now these bolder vertical lines are very annoying.

I guess this feature is called "indent guides". I found where to turn them on or off, but the settings for active and inactive don't appear to change the style - I always get "thick" obtrusive vertical lines no matter what color I choose.

You mean that lines?

s017.radikal.ru/i412/1603/44/81cfe5f93504.png

Yes, they're called "indent giudes", and I can deactivate them at "Tools" - "Settings" - "Editor theme" - "Editor" - "Indent guides" (checkbox)

When these guides were first implemented, some people noticed they were quite heavy and they could not change the style of them.

For other people such as myself the lines were faint and the settings did change the style.

At the time I guessed that some video adapters have some sort of issue with whatever method is used to draw these lines, but I don't know if that was ever confirmed as an issue or in any way changed/fixed.

Maybe that is the problem that a_edwall has?

It is also my impression that it has something to do with the video driver. On my new laptop, the lines are very thick and annoying.

Maybe NuSphere can still optimize here.

I'm having the same problem for a long time. It appears on the systems with nVidia Optimus switchable graphics (Intel + nVidia). A lot of laptops are equipped with this technology. I've wrote about it to the NuSphere support, but they didn't help me to solve this issue.

v17 uses AlphaBlend() instead of TransparentBlt(), so the buggy graphics drivers (like one that comes with Intel i5/i7 built-in graphics) that have broken TransparentBlt() should work okay now.