Missing text in drop down menues

I have freshly installed Intrepid Ibex (on to a freshly formatted hard disk), and added Google earth, LightScribe software and QDVDAuthor. But the drop down menues do not have any visible text, except for underscores. The computer seems to think that the text is there, clicking on the blank spot causes the appropriate action, eg. hovering on "Help" causes a blank drop down menu. If I click where the bottom line of text should be, a picture of someone holding a boy pops up, but there is no text there either.

I used Synaptic package manager to completely remove QDVDAuthor, rebooted, then installed (via Synaptic) QDVDAuthor with the same result - blank menues. Firefox, Google Earth and the LaCie Lightscribe software work normally, Google Earth's installation asked to have the NVidia version 96 driver enabled, if that has any relevance? I did install Kino (via synaptic) but have "completely Remove"ed it before trying QDVDAuthor