It turns out the reason I reacted so harshly when I realized the changed colors on the end-of-game stats screen is not that a huge amount of changes tho how things display have been made, but that it is because of a bug, possibly in mesa.
Sometimes, both on my laptop with the Intel GPU, and the separately installed (but settings migrated from the laptop) tower PC with an ATI (X1650), the end-of-game screen would look something like this:
This is also what it looked like the first time I realized that changes were made to the colors there. But only now I learnt that things are actually supposed to look differently. And since both the open source Intel and ATI drivers seem to be based on mesa, this would seem to be the common base causing this issue.
While the laptop won't be available for the time being (in repair) I hope to be able to upgrade the tower system (with the ATI) to Ubuntu 11.04 soon. This should get me a newer X11, and hopefully a more mature open source ATI driver for this (according to AMD's categorization) legacy GPU chipset.
