What are these boxes and what happened to my menu?

[socamx]

Take a look at these two pictures, I can't figure out how to get rid of these black boxes around everything. Seems to focus on the first clickable item in every window.

And what the heck happened to my Apple menu?
On my old iBook it is just Sleep, Restart, Shut Down and one Log out.

10.4.9 has been pretty whacky on my G5 so far (which these are both from)... The other day the SystemUIServer crashed on me when I tried to open the fast user switcher and I had to force reboot because I got stuck on a blue screen.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[swiftaw]

Have you tried repairing permissions and restarting?

 

[socamx]

Well the permissions thing I've never bothered doing unless things go really wrong. Personally I think it is just voodoo but I'll give it a shot right now.

I've been holding off on rebooting because I want to wait to know if I can install this hard drive I just got first, but I did try logging out and back in.
Also have poked around system preferences to see if universal access has anything to do with it but to no avail.

I will try rebooting in a bit though, this G5 is a pseudo server (IRC, UT2004 Server, IRC Bots, light webhost etc) so I try to avoid rebooting.

 

[TheAnswer]

Menu > System Preferences > Universal Access ...turn Voiceover Off.

 

[socamx]

Only one thing fixed with repair permissions:
Permissions differ on ./private/var/log/secure.log, should be -rw------- , they are -rw-r-----

Edit: Thank you TheAnswer, that was driving me nuts. Dunno how I missed that or how it got turned on.

 

[TheAnswer]

You probably hit command-F5 by mistake...it's very hard to tell anything's actually happening except the boxes unless you have your speakers on.

 

[socamx]

I usually keep the speakers off, guess that's why I had no clue what was going on with it.
Still can't believe I missed that when I went through the options.