Rod, thank you so much for the reply.

The blue is just your standard #0000FF blue, which should be safe with 8 bit quality, and the slides were set to 8 bit quality the last time they were published (and worked) in an older version Captivate.  Kind of weird, right?

BUT, being the optimist that I am, I took your suggestion and tried setting one of the slides to 24 bit, and the blue is blue once again rather than black!  Very bizarre, but faster than the work around I had found yesterday so I'm probably going to roll with it.  I found that changing the slide quality to 24 bit has a minimal impact on the size of the published swf file, so I'm good.

Again, oddly enough, my work around mentioned above involves changing the default caption style to what Captivate calls "default caption capture style".  With my caption style set as this my blue is blue, even with the slide quality set at 8 bit.  I took one of my older courses and went through changing all of the caption styles.  Took me a little while as changing the caption style changes the font, font color, font styles, font sizes, paragraph alignment settings, etc., etc.

And on a side track, I got to thinking after I noticed that changing the caption style seemed to fix the font color issue...  My original project used a custom caption style, one that I had not yet "reinstalled" since upgrading to Captivate 5.5.  So, I added the custom caption styles, even changed the name of the caption style and tried to reapply it, but no dice.

It seems that, with the slide quality set at 8 bit, if I use a caption style of "default caption style", my blue is black on publish.  But, if I use a different caption style, such as "default capture caption style", my blue is blue, even at 8 bit quality.