So with the Finder window in the background and Apple's mail.app in the foreground I move the cursor so that it hovers over the Finder's find file window and the buttons highlight when hovered over.
Bringing the Finder window to the foreground I move the cursor to hover over buttons in Apple's mail.app which then highlight.

As a consequence of posting this page to #macintosh on EFNet I found out that those annoying yellow boxes are hated by many and they are called tooltips and they can be turned off in Safari and I did so. I have not been able to locate knowledge about how to do so with mail.app or Finder
Safari-Mail-Suckage
Safari-Finder-Suckage
iPhoto-Mail-Safari-Finder-Suckage