If working with win32 (no MFC) take a look at this to change color of items in the list:
Using ListView control under Win32 API[
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This part of the article says it all:
"You won't believe how much time I took to dig this up to actually work! I mean, 99.99% examples were MFC only!
So here we go, finally, pure WinAPI code for listview colors."
If you can use MFC, this this article shows an hyperlink:
CGridListCtrlEx - Grid Control Based on CListCtrl[
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Hope it helps.