Next time you stroll the computer aisles at Best Buy or Costco, pay attention to the desktops on those gleaming new PCs. If they all match, it might not be coincidence—or store clerks—at work.

Last week I posted three Windows Vista wallpapers, including the one at left, and posed a question: what do they have in common? 

If you caught my short profile of Microsoft programmer Steve Fu last week, you probably deduced the answer:

All three photos were snapped by Microsoft employees.

Fu took the grand prize in a company-wide Vista photo contest held last year. But Dina Taylor, a product manager in Microsoft's mobile division, was close behind. Her winning entry shows a dew-moistened field near downtown Seattle.  She shot it on her way to work with a Canon PowerShot G6.

Until now, only a handful of friends and family were in on the secret. But some have been waging a quiet campaign to make her contribution to Vista more visible.

"I have a couple friends who take a few minutes to change every machine’s background image to mine when they are at Costco, Fry’s, etc.," Taylor told me in an e-mail. (By coincidence, evidence of one such Costco covert op arrived in her in-box a few days after we spoke—that's her friend, Neil, there on the right working the Windows Control Panel.)

Taylor finds it amusing, but says she doesn't encourage the "guerilla background changing." Considering that Vista now runs on 60 million computers and counting, her friends have a lot of mouse clicking left to do. 

Taylor also has competition.

Gustavo Siqueira, who works at Microsoft Brazil in Sao Paulo, says his friends and co-workers have been doing the same thing on his behalf. Siqueira shot his winning Vista wallpaper off the northern coast of Brazil in 2005.

He and some friends were exploring a ship wreck when they encountered a school of fish. Siqueira captured the moment with a Canon PowerShot S60 (housed in a marine case) and an underwater strobe.

"It’s a little part of Brazil in every PC around the world," he says.

It's easy to forget that behind every computer or cool gadget is a bunch of real people, each with a story to tell. Maybe I'm weird (don't answer that) but even a button on my dishwasher can inspire me to wonder: Who designed that? Why is it square, not round? Did its creator ever lose sleep over it? Is that person proud?

As I write this, a few thousand people in the surrounding offices are already sweating over the next version of Windows.  With luck, in the months ahead, I'll be able to share some of their stories.

<Michael Stroh>

More Windows trivia: The Vista start-up jingle was recorded by legendary King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. If you're curious, check out this cool behind-the-scenes video shot by my colleagues over at Microsoft's community site, Channel 9.