Update 14/Aug/2018: I no longer maintain the patched Debian package mentioned and the download links below are most likely broken.
Debian 7 (wheezy) comes with XFCE 4.8. By default, the “simple” splash screen on session startup displays startup messages with an ugly text shadow that makes the text blurry and harder to read.
This is annoying enough that for example OpenSuse and Fedora both applied a patch to remove the text shadow.
Unfortunately, in Debian, XFCE 4.8 still has the text shadow. So I applied this fix and rebuilt the deb from source. I followed this excellent how-to by Raphaël Hertzog. Feel free to download the resulting xfce4-session_4.8.3-3foo1_i386.deb
You can then install it like this:
sudo dpkg -i xfce4-session_4.8.3-3foo1_i386.deb
If you don’t use sudo then you have to run the dpkg command as the root user in the usual way.
Oleander Donovan's IT blog 