Selection of text hilite color

Judging from your screen shot, your page color (Windows window color) is ivory. You may not see this if the window color in your browser is also ivory, but it is very obvious to me since my window color is white.

Here's what I see in Word 2013:

And the same in Word 2010:

Ah, that's where I've seen it then, in shaded text. But I believe the OP is talking about selecting just ordinary text, and in that case the text "highlight" (selection) is black or blue or gray depending on version.

Here's what I see in Word 2013, with one word selected in each paragraph with different paragraph shading colors:

All of the text has Automatic font color, and the shading colors are chosen from the theme palette.

The selection highlight should always be the complementary color to the text's background -- black on a white background, yellow on a blue background, and so on.

That's certainly the theory. In practice, I find that that in Word 2003 the shading is black regardless of the text color. In Word 2007 and 2010, the selection is a medium blue (a little darker than the shading of the quote above). In Word 2013, it is dark gray. I seem to recall that I have observed what you describe at some point in Word 2003, but I can't get it to work at the moment: all black regardless of text color. If the text is Automatic, at least the selected text reverses to white.

The selection highlight should always be the complementary color to the text's background -- black on a white background, yellow on a blue background, and so on. If the background color is a light shade of any color, the selection highlight should be solid black. There are no options that let you change the selection highlight.

If this isn't what you see, maybe you can increase the contrast setting of your screen, or use one of the high contrast schemes in the Windows Personalization control panel.