This goes a long way toward what you want... You can set it to show you when a process starts or stops... Plus a whole lot of other stuff.


INFORMER.......... Informer gives to you information about: current systen activity - CPU usage, number of running processes and threads, available memory, a full list of running processes with detailed information about each process, and fully qualified information about your computer system. Informer has no window. This is a text string dynamically showing information about current system load. You can place it at the desired location on screen, change font and color. Unlike many others system monitors Informer takes very little screen space.....(free).....<A href="http://informer.russia.webmatrixhosting.net/">GO THERE!</A>

I just checked Jasmin's 3DCC, and it'll let you color inactive captions, caption text, gradients, and borders, but not the body  of the window itself