Because of a CERT advisory of several out-of-band security updates released by MS I did a Critical Updates pass on my WinXP Pro SP3 machine.

I now have the situation where it seems that all of my WinXP-generated menus come up with all items black. If I wave the cursor over the menu, the items will update as they become active (go blue) and then update correctly (to black-text-on-white-background) as they go non-active. Separators (which never get a hover event) stay black.

App-level context menus seem to work fine (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) with the exception of Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer, which both exhibit this behavior on both their context menus and on their menu bar drop down menus. I'm assuming that's true because they are all using the same library code.

Thoughts? Fixes? Help!