Strange colors in gnome menus after Xorg upgrade

[Brandon Kuczenski <brandon 301south net>]

I am using Gnome (i think 2.12.3) on a Debian system.

I just decided to upgrade my old XFree86 server to Xorg, since apparently 
that's what we're supposed to do and I thought it would solve some video 
card problems (it didn't -- but rendering is faster now).. then I upgraded 
gnome from 2.12.2 to 2.12.3 -- it only upgraded a few gnome packages and 
not all of them (there are several that still list 2.10.x version 
numbers, and many more that list, e.g. 2.12.1).

Anyway, everything seems to work fine... except the gnome 'foot' menu, 
tabs in gnome-terminal, and popup dialog boxes all have very peculiar 
colors.  The foot menu is the most bizarre: every time I click on it it 
seems to come up a different color.  Everything is supposed to be gray but 
it comes up, sometimes deep blue, sometimes pale yellow-faded, sometimes 
black (with black text, of course)... also, the borders of windows and 
things are occasionally strange colors.  Everything seems to work normally 
except for this.

I figured I probably needed to upgrade some gnome-related packages that 
were incorrectly specified to the package manager, or something -- but I 
have no idea which.  Taking a random guess, I tried upgrading 
libgnomeui-0, which triggered upgrades of a number of other packages 
(surprisingly, to 2.14.x!)  (the 'About Gnome' dialog, which is also 
affected by the weirdness, states the gnome version is 2.12.3).

Any idea?  The color scheme is 'festive' but I'm not feeling festive.

I put a screenshot on http://301south.net/~b/gnome-colors.png -- you can 
see the maize-yellow tabs on gnome-terminal (which have since the 
screenshot changed to green), glitchy red-orange on the 'screensaver 
preferences' window, mysterious sky blue on the screenshot dialog 
itself... so bizarre.

Thanks in advance for any hints.
-Brandon