I can't answer your question because I do not think that it an be changed,
but agree with your sentiment. I find the new scrollbars harder to use. It
is a fix when there was no problem. For Canonical it is about appearance and
maximising content and minimising chrome. I am using Kubuntu and KDE does
not have them, but some GNOME apps in KDE do have them (like Pan); others do
not. A fix could be to re-install 10.10 or switch to KDE and use KDE
applications only. Or you can wait for 11.10 which is supposed to be more
configurable.

From what I've read about them, they're an overlay and, from what I
understand, will manifest on native gnome application you install,
irrespective of whether it's come from Canonical or not (although, as
you point out, not necessarily everything). This suggests, to me at
least, that they should be switchable on or off somewhere - hopefully
someone out there has an answer.

I used to use KDE 3 but, with the advent of KDE 4, I do not get on
with it at all. Didn't click with xfce, either, sadly.

Found this page:

*
u8untu.blogetery.com/.../
*

Basically, there were two options ...
*
Remove those silly ayatana scrollbars

If your scrollbars were changed by the recent Natty upgrade, you can remove
them like this

Open Synaptic >> search for liboverlay >> remove

or

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar

This removes the silly overlay scrollbars which turn a simple one-click
scroll into a two-click scroll.*

I first tried the apt-get option from the command line, then restarted, but
this didn't appear to work. Tried the synaptic option, logged out and in
again - bingo! Happy-happy-joy-joy! Real, usable scrollbars!

Hope that this helps others out there ...

KDE 4 is now mature and better than KDE 3 ever was. On recent Phoronix tests
on Ubuntu, KDE was faster than GNOME 2, 3 or Unity for most things. I admit
that it was a performance dog when first versions were compared to KDE 3,
but that has not been the case for some time. Now the performance dogs are
Unity and GNOME 3. But I admit that that too will change. Any new desktop
environment has wrinkles to iron out. That was the case with KDE and it is
the case with Unity and GNOME 3.