Vista - Vista's Color Management doesn't change profiles

I just received my Dell 2408WFP a few days ago, and before I shell out some money on a hardware calibrator, I tried playing with the Color Management settings in Control Panel first.

The issue right now is that the active profile doesn't change no matter what ICC profile I use. It's stuck on whatever the active profile is. I've used LUT Manager to force ICC profiles, which does work, but I want to know how to fix the issue with Vista not being able to switch profiles on its own. I have a feeling this affects other color managed applications which depend on Windows' setting.

I've noticed this in the past when I had different monitors as well. I didn't notice any changes when I applied different profiles in Color Management. This has been the case in Vista RTM, SP1 and now SP2. I've used both Nvidia cards and ATI cards during this time span.

Another minor issue is that when I force profiles with LUT Manager, everything but the mouse cursor change. If I use a low (proper) brightness profile, the cursor remains much brighter. This is most pronounced against white backgrounds where the cursor is much "whiter" than the white background. I don't know if this is caused by LUT Manager's forcing profiles, or something else.

Anyone want to provide some insight?

Just thought I'd mention something in passing...

There's no such thing as accurate software colour calibration. If you work in an industry where calibration is important, I'd suggest saving yourself some (uncalibrated!) grey hair and buying a hardware calibrator sooner rather than later.

And I did just that this afternoon. (Un)surprisingly, the Spyder2 calibration software was unable to change the color profile it created. I had to use LUT Manager.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled my video driver (Catalyst 9.4) and that didn't fix it. I tried changing profiles on a Win7 system and it worked fine.