I remember on a forum somewhere some guy was working on a System Tray program that automatically closed Explorer.exe when certain games were launched. (To prevent color problems in 256-color/8-bpp games) but it never saw the light of day.

Does anyone know what happened to it, or (if someone has enough programming prowess) if someone can make one themselves?

One issue with it though is that he built in the names of the .exe files, where a better solution would be to let the user add them him/herself.

This would be much easier then having to make a batch file for every game, and would allow it to be used no matter how or where the game is launched (whether by Steam, or by Explorer, etc.)