Comment 1 for bug 159315

A means of making the workaround for Writer work for Impress and Draw is to go to Options > OpenOffice.org > Accessibility and disable "Automatically detect high-contrast mode of operating system" and "Use system colours for page previews". It's still necessary to select "Colour" mode over Greyscale or Black and White though. On Impress this seems to require clicking on the slide first, which seems odd to me, and it doesn't affect the slide previews down the left hand side.

For some reason, a side effect of having a dark desktop colour scheme seems to be that OpenOffice.org defaults to not using Colour mode (I don't know which mode it does use - there's no tick mark next to any of them). I have verified that this is due to the colour scheme by changing to a lighter colour scheme and back again.