All the buttons in AbiWord Portable have a red field behind them, rather than the gray chrome of the rest of the application. There is even a red field behind the AbiWord logo when I alt+tab to the program. This does not appear to alter the functionality of the program. I'm using AbiWord Portable 2.6.4 on Windows 2000 Pro.
What is the color depth of your display (32bit, 16bit, 256 color, etc)? I think there may be a bug in the current AbiWord release around this on Win2K
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
wasn't red buttons a comedian?, I have the same problem it seems to occur on 16 and 32 bit colour also on the lowest setting the buttons are red and on 32 bit they are thick horizontal lines and not even solid but in the higher settings above that its fine, I'm running it on an old PII lap top that only goes up to 32 bit
As mentioned, it seems to be a Color Depth problem. I noticed it as well. I set my netbook to 16bit, and see the problem.
I only use the portable version, so I have no idea if the problem is with the portable compression, or also in the native software.
You can see screen shots of the problem here
16 bit with red buttons http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h44/trudy_w/Jeff_Storage/abiword_16bit...
32 bit correct buttons http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h44/trudy_w/Jeff_Storage/abiword_32bit...