Shortly after upgrading to the dual 3870′s I started noticing that red text was showing up as blue until something on the page refreshed. It was driving me insane trying to do development and seeing the colors show up like this. It didn’t take very long to find the solution on the Firefox site (and apparently some other apps are having the same issue). Then again my first search I didn’t see anything and being the impatient person I am, I un-installed and re-installed Firefox to no avail as well as disabling (renaming) my Application Data\Mozilla and Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla folders. I refined the search to something like red blue Firefox ATI since I was fairly certain it started with the new card.

The unfortunate thing is that it’s not listed as a current issue on the AMD/ATI driver site.

Regardless, here’s what I found…

Blue text shows as red (Windows)

The ATI Catalyst 7.12 video drivers can cause blue text to show as red on Windows XP. You have a few options to fix this problem:

• Roll back your video driver to 7.11.
• Turn on ClearType. Instructions available here.
• Turn off font smoothing. Instructions available here.

I chose to turn on ClearType and it fixed the issue. Just waiting to see if ClearType does something odd now.