Windows 7 - font colors gone and web buttons missing

Help? Anyone seen this before? I believe this to be some software or driver issue but am not sure, could be hardware I guess, I don't think it's a piece of malicious code though...
Symptoms:
1) Font colors don't appear in MS documents like excel, word, powerpoint although I can look at the properties of said characters and they claim to be colored.
2) colors show in Paint and other offline operation seems normal though I haven't exhausted the possibilities.
3) Web pages all have missing buttons and background pictures like little GIF files and the like, for instance no "Add to Cart" button in Amazon although I can scroll the mouse over where the button should be and detect that it is there, but hiding. Same problem w Explorer or Firefox.
4) The word "Help?" at the beginning of my post should be some other color than black, but shows up as black on my screen.
System:
Lenovo 510 x64 PC // Windows 7 Pro // i7 CPU // 8GB mem
NVDIA NVS 3100M 512MB // all updates applied
Attempts at looking at problem:
1) Lenovo diagnostics say all is fine.
2) Avast, Malwarbytes, HouseCall all report no problems (am using ZoneAlarm too).
3) Hardware Resources seem to all check out fine
User experience:
1) Give me a DOS, XP or Linux machine and I know what I'm doing.
2) I'm totally lost with Window 7.
Any ideas?:
Am I in the right forum? Any help is of course greatly appreciated!