I just installed Firefox via synaptic and my menubar highlights are "white font on white background" for lack of a better description. In other words, you move the highlight over a menu choice and that word disappears. Move the highlight off the menu choice, and you can see it again. The menus work, you just can't see this highlighted item.

This is only apparent on the menubar (up top where it says "File|Edit|View|Go|Bookmarks|Tools|Help"), and only in Firefox. This only affects the text in the menu choices, not any icons (e.g., the yellow folder icons under Bookmarks are visible, but not the text that tells you what folder is what.) Mozilla browser (standard with Debian) works fine.

I can't find any Firefox preferences to set menubar highlight color or anything like that. Nothing that jumped out at me under "about:config" either.

Running Debian Sarge 3.1r0a with a 2.6.12-1-686 kernel (from unstable) and Firefox 1.0.4-2sarge5 (from stable).

Thanks for any pointers on how to resolve this!

Well, Firefox 1.0.7 is available now, so what you're experiencing might have been fixed by now ...

The problem turned out to be theme related. The default Debian Sarge Gnome theme - "Simple" just doesn't cut it for those menubar choices in Firefox (and I found out later - for Thunderbird either). I switched to a different theme and all is well.