Thunderbird picks up a lot of it's colours from the windows control panel. Try using a different theme in Windows and see if that changes anything. I am guessing the colour of the text is set to white on a white background.

Hi, Matt. No, that seems not to be the problem. The menu box is transparant, so you see right through it. The only thing you see from the menu box is the shadow on the right and bottom. See the picture. I clicked the options button, the window opened, all empty, after about 15 seconds the menu appeared, then I clicked the item extra .... That is what's to see on the picture. Think I go back to the previous version of T'bird.

IF that is the case, perhaps a full install of the current version might fix things. I truly am guessing, but I think that one of the files in the install is perhaps a little corrupted and a reinstall would refresh the relevant file.

Hi Matt. I removed T'bird 31.1.1, reinstalled T'bird 31.1.1. Same problem. I downgraded to T'bird 24.6, .... all back to normal. Upgraded to 31.0, the old problem is back, downgraded to 24.6, .... all back to normal. So I think I'll stick to 24.6 for a while.