I'm not sure how to fix that either. Post a thread in the help section, someone will be able to figure it out. Also, congrats on the snipe!
You download optifine to bring color to chat and reduce lag. Here is the link: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/249 ... much-more/
Are you using a Vista? If so that may be it . I have a vista and a 7 and vista is sO in colorful compared to 7.
Same problem on my friends computer :/ youre machine is probably running REALLY slow or there may be some other problem. If your PC/Mac is slow or doesnt have much RAM then try playing around with your video settings. If that doesn't help then I'm sorry there's not much I can do and I recommend listening to Mardigan and posting that problem in. The bug report section or something.
The problem is a videocard that doesn't support opengl 1.4 (usually crappy/old videocards) and notch dropped opengl1.3 support a while ago. Installing optifine will fix it.
Yes I LOVE optifine. I got the one to fix my color (I had the same problem) and it worked MIRACLES. They also had one for speed and it boosted my speed from 1-5 fps to like...50
