Dark skins in MS Word and Outlook unreadable?

I feel sure this is a common question, but I've hunted and can't find it asked before so...

The various dark skins (Exos is one) are unusable to me on my Windows XP system because they turn the background color of Word and Outlook dark grey, which has poor contrast with the text color. I tried excluding them both (MS Office doesn't get skinned anyway) but the background color is still being changed in those apps. There's a solution to setting the background color in Word, but it only works in Web view. There's no solution to the Outlook problem, tho a bunch of customizing by hand makes it a little better--but only in some windows.

Is there a solution to this? Or is anybody using MS Office avoiding the dark skins?

Windows XP, WindowBlinds 6.4

Thanks