'Scanning' the screen..?

Hello everyone ..

Well, lately my interest has felt into the category of bots, but to make any really interesting and useful bots I'm gonna need some feedback from the picture on my screen.

I know that this is rather easily done if the app I want to monitor is a .net app, but sadly, most arent.

So, does anyone know any 'easy' work-around for this issue? Maybe something that'd allow me to for example, see which color a certain pixel on my monitor is or something like that. I know picture manipulation like this is quite hard to do, so I was hoping someone had some sort of neat trick for some primitive screen-recognation (sp?).

Huge thanks in advance!

If this is too big a question, any hints on how to get started / what to search for etc. would be highly appreciated. Im at a rock bottom here .. :)