This is a complex issue which i found only on one of my machines (unfortunately affecting 4 users):

The background and menus of firefox/thunderbird turned completely black. Together with the black font colour the apps are totally unusable. In the edit->preferences->content->colors dialog the entire colour palette appears to be black.

I found this only happens if the previous desktop session was a kde session. So if the current session is kde and the previous was xfce, the colours are fine.if the current is xfce and the previous was kde, the colours are black.

As I said, two machines are fine, the third one has this issue in all four user accounts.

Workaround is to roll out xfce to all users and dump kde at last. don't like the blue glow of the oxygen theme that seems to be unconfigurable in 4.8.2 anyway.

Has anyone seen such a thing? Google is remarkably quiet on this one.

I have something similar on my desktop machine, but it's when I change the KDE splash screen Firefox goes all black. A reboot seems to cure it. As I only change splash screen when I upgrade to a newer version of KDE it is no great hassle. I wonder, is it something to do with Nvidia drivers? I have got an Nvidia GTX220 graphics card with propriety 64-295.33 driver.

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Yes, I have seen this. I isolated the problem to occurring after I had booted into an X session, then logged out, then logged back in. If I do a cold boot after logging out then the problem does not occur. I have only seen this occurring an a machine with nVidia graphics using the proprietary driver. I have not tried this, but a possible fix could be to uncomment "#TerminateServer=true" in /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc.

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Does this affect all Gtk applications or just FF and TB? Do you have any of gtk-kde, QtCurve-Gtk, gtk-qt-engine or similar SBo packages installed that might be interfering with the standard KDE colours for Gtk applications?

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thx to all who replied. yes, the machine has a GeForce GT 240 card and uses the proprietary driver, currently 295.40.

You're defintely on to something. Upon further checking it affects all Gtk applications (like Gimp and some xfce apps). The machine has qtcurce-gtk2, qtcurve-kde4 and gtkglex installed. I have just upgraded to the latest available qtcurve-gtk2-1.8.15, qtcurve-kde4-1.8.12 but the issue persists.

The funny thing is, another machine with basically the same software installation (and Geforce GTX 560 Ti hardware) has no such problem...

I use qtcurve and have never encountered the problem you are describing. However, some of the other packages that attempt to make Qt and Gtk applications look the same have caused issues for me in the past.

You could try uninstalling these packages and/or create a new user with a clean home directory to see if the problem is related to an old config file somewhere.

I also recall manually setting up a symlink for a Gtk config file somewhere in my home directory at one point. I'll try to remember to check what is was this evening.

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I think I can help here. I had this very same problem.
The fix is in /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc

at line 509

uncomment #TerminateServer=true (ie remove the #, ok you knew that)

regards
tobyl

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thanks allend & tobyl. While hunting for the right section i noticed there are a few references to this issue on the intarwebz. I found out the line goes into section [X-:*-Core]. Looks promising. I will wait for user feedback and - if all goes well - set this thread to closed.

MB: Afterwards I noticed there was a kdmrc.new waiting, which indeed has the required comment in line 509.

marking the thread as solved (although quite frankly the solution is just a workaround for some unidentified software issue)