Invisibility of 'tips' boxes in applications (solved)

[skylark53]

(From http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=116) Several people use this computer, normally without problems. But I have just opened Excel after a month or so and suddenly the little boxes that appear when you float over things -- e.g. a data point on a graph -- are blank.

I have checked tools\options\chart and "show values" is ticked, as ever. The boxes themselves appear as they always have - but they are empty / plain white.

It's as if the colour table has been changed so that the (X,Y) values that must be in the box are written in white. But I can't find anyway of changing either the text colour or the box background colour.

Solved.

It had nothing to do with Excel settings. It was something on the desktop setup.

Under Properties\Appearance\Advanced, the colours of the item "ToolTip" had been changed to be white-on-white, hence the text was invisible. I changed it to white-on-purple, figuring I'd spot that.

And I did - in an unexpected place. In my browser, Seamonkey, secure links (https://) took on the colours of ToolTips - whereas ordinary URLs remained the same. Well, well.

Anyway, it fixed the Excel problem - so Excel is using ToolTips to report the X,Y values of graphical points. This may explain why it has proved impossible to switch off ToolTips, which I generally find extremely annoying - they are too widely used by MS, and too much would break if you were to turn them off.

I am going to post this under Windows XP as well, and hope the moderators will allow that, since this factoid seems most useful there.