Comment 5 for bug 980710

After further checking and testing, I've found that many existing gtk themes are not updated for gtk 3.4.x.

I've now selected the Adwaita theme, and the problems on evolution, gnome, etc where black text appears on black are gone. There also appears to be a need to have a ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file with the correct gtk settings. This has been tested on an openbox environment, and I expect it is the same for xfce.