Thank you, I believe I see how this works now. 
Thank you for enlightening me on the video card.  I have had this problem before with other applications.  It has something to do with alphas and transparencies. 
I did find a workaround.  Basically, in the button window.  There are tabs on top of tabs. So what I did was: rearrange the tabs, and saved it as my default user interface.

I have a PCI express 7200 GS, nVIDA EVGA.  If I update Blender, it would probably fix this.  I understand that there are a lot of bug fixes in the 2.48a release.
 Again, thank you for your help.  Very much appreciated!