rjbull: I only have 64bit installs of Windows atm, so I can't test it - but my guess is that for NT it's only going to affect the current (ie, not all cmd.exe instances), and either won't work for
win32 console applications or is going to slow down console output tremendously - will probably work for 16bit dos applications, but possibly also involving slowdown.
Anyway, the best option would be getting tools that natively support the win32 console API (or a shell that supports ANSI colors...), instead of resorting to hacks. Too bad the UnxUtils project is dead, so you're probably stuck with the cygwin (bleargh!) based gnuwin32