I am new to kdenlive - just stared using it today.

When I hover the mouse over icons the text which pops up is unreadable it is a black box with extremely dark grey text. I am afraid that I do not find the icon's purpose to be in any way obvious so it is more or less unusable.

Any idea how I can overcome this? Is there some setting I can tweak?

I'd guess this is in your KDE, Gnome, xfce, fluxbox whatever theme manager. You can also change the theme kdenlive uses under kdenlive menu Config -> Themes or some such place can't remember exactly. if you have the necessary themes installed.

Thanks,
That solved it. I run gnome on my ubuntu 10.10 setup. Only had the default kdenlive theme installed. I installed a bunch of kde themes and now I have selected one which does show the text in a readable form.