Comment 6 for bug 991009

I tried logging in as guest, but I am using the latest Netbeans 7.1.2 which isn't in the repository. It is in my /home directory, so guest doesn't see it.
I don't know how you are seeing menus if you are using Ambiance. I started to use Radiance to solve the problem.
Since Netbeans is so central to my workflow I also posted a message in their forum and got a lot of useful help

http://forums.netbeans.org/viewtopic.php?t=47823&sid=d029aa1b6fa5e98eecbed2db071fbd70

The most useful tip was to append "--laf Metal" to the execute command. The Metal look and feel solves the problem for me. It also solves the ugly bold text, so I can now tell which is the main project.

Apparently the problem is already known since another person reported:

Hi guys, you may have noticed that a new LTS been released several hours ago.
It has a bug in a default gtk2 theme "Ambiance".
All java applications menus will have a black font on a black background.
Bug already reported on launchpad, but have no idea when it will be fixed, so here is a solution:
sudo vim /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

Find a row 338 with contents:
style "menu" {

and make it look like this:
style "menu" = "dark" {

save and your java menus will be fine.