Vista - Visual Effects Glitches

I have two problems with the Visual Effects in Vista Business x64. The initial problem is the following:

Problem #1
Assuming I have all visual effects enabled, the computer boots, Vista loads, everything is pretty and fine. The first time I make a selection from a menu, that menu selection does not fade out. It persists on my screen. All subsequent menu selections fade out correctly. If I do something that forces a screen refresh (say set color to 24-bit and then revert back to 32-bit) the menu selection is cleared by the refresh but, again the first menu selection will persist. Right Click menus and drop down menus are the culprits but Start Menu selections appear to be exempt from this glitch. This happens regardless of my scheme i.e. Aero, Classic, Standard, Vista Basic, etc.

Problem #2
This occurs when I attempt the most obvious work around to the first problem. If I disable the Visual Effect "Fade out menu items after clicking" then my problem goes away. When I reboot, however, the Visual Effect reverts back to being enable. If I change the radio button for my Visual Effect from "Custom" to "Adjust for best performance", that change appears to persist through reboots but despite that I get Problem #1. So, TLDR version: Customization of Visual Effects refuses to persist across reboots.

Dell Precision M6400
Vista Business x64
6GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro 2700M (driver version 7.15.11.7653 )

Eventually I found fixes.

Problem #1
Scrapped Dell's official video card driver and also the Solidworks approved version of that driver. Got newest driver version from laptop2go.com. This had the side benefit of fixing the nvlddmkm.sys crashes I was also having.

Problem #2 I had UAC turned on, like a newb.

I'm having the same problem. I updated to nVidia's new drivers and it seems to have worked for now. I would right click and the first option I would choose would remain on the screen in a semitransparent state until I played around with the display settings.

I turned off the fade menu item visual effect. I had to turn it back on as the menus would appear very transparent until I moved my mouse slightly and then they would appear normally.