Problems with the interface

[skyworthy]

Lately I have been having some problems. I have these whitish gray boxes surrounding the text on the bars. As seen in the screenshot:


How do I get rid of these?

I'm also having trouble interacting with menus - like that in the change background window - with my mouse. Any ideas?

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and I installed the most recent version of gnome on it.