It works like a charm for me all the time. Looking at your example I’m amazed by the mess your page contains, I can see all kinds of manipulation done manually … that’s 99 out of a 100 times the reason things don’t work out. Even when I use several CSS menu’s on one page, it still works perfectly (check work in progress here: ontwerpzaam.nl ).
When breaking down your code, it seems to me you’ve manually added a class to the CSS Menu text (style17) which overrules all earlier loaded styles in the section. Style17 turns your text white, even though the CSS Menu styles loaded earlier had a different colour in mind.
Try removing this applied style and things will look different. You should create a body style where you already define your font, text-colour, and all things that can act as standard. Create DIV styles to target DIV that need different styles (larger font, different style behavior) and don’t interfere with CSS Menu’s outside the Actions-palette.