Is there a way of changing the default chart colors *permanently* so
that every *new* workbook has them?

I know about, but should not have to go through the manual nonsense
each time of copying the chart colors from another workbook. In other
words, I would like the color sequence for lines and fills to be part
of the normal Workbook template, so that charts automatically take on
my prefered colors. How can one do that?

Second, and this one truly bugs me, is that Excel fills in the
background of charts (the fill area) with dull grey. (What a
ridiculous choice on aesthetic grounds! What a bad user-interface
design that we seem stuck with it as the default for new workbooks!) I
would like to stop it from doing that and instead have each new chart,
in any new workibook, come up with the fill being white! Again, I
know about creating a chart and then making it the default for *that*
workbook, but I shouldn't need to do that each time for each new
workbook!

This is 2006, folks, and I cannot believe that Excel still cannot do
these things, still cannot save the user prefered colors and fills in
the basic template. I am hoping that I am simply wrong about all this
and that there's some obvious solution I've overlooked or have not
found on the net.

Even if Excel doesn't have a way of doing these things, perhaps there
is a way of hacking the default color and fill scheme. I know that
each upgrade of Word I run the Resource Editor and change the color of
the paragraph markers to red so that they will show up distinctly when
I reveal formatting marks.