I have the KQ9 Alex wallpaper as my background. Mmm... (drool)...
...er.
(cleans up the drool)
Anyhoo. I also find bright-white backgrounds to be uncomfortable to look at for long periods of time. At home I have Opera and Notepad open the most, and I have both set to have a sort of pale blue as a default background. If I go to read a website with a bright white background for a long period of time, I have a user CSS sheet I switch too that's a bit tamer on the eyes.
At work I'm stuck with default background-ed Word and IE5. But I generally don't have to look at either for very long periods of time, so it's not too bad. Our database program gets a lot of use from me, but it's a very plain light-text-on-black DOS-based program, so not bad. The desktop wallpaper is random images of scenery throughout the country. Kind of interesting, and easy enough on the eyes. No, it's the fact that the monitors are old, and thus can't handle more than a 60Hz refresh, that's the issue.

Peace & Luv, Liz