Feeling outrageously stupid

I have been working on this for over 6 hours but I am stumped. My Color Picker on my iMac is missing the options of showing the colour wheel, crayons etcetera. Nor does it have the little bar on the right hand side which toggles the view of those options. I have reinstalled Lion. No dice. I have upgraded Pages. No dice. I have tried copying from my notebook and putting in the right libraries. Nope. I have tried restoring from time machine. And Super Duper. I cannot find the Color Picker app anywhere on my system but it is there. And when I haul it up using Applescript, it is a complete and perfect Color Picker. But when I invoke it from inside Pages or Numbers, it is a maimed and bedraggled thing of very little value. I did try opening palettes from it but it reports an error and says no go.

I even tried to go back and reinstall Leopard thinking I could then upgrade again but system won't let me use my Leopard disk anymore (I have no clue why--everything I own is legal).

I know that in terms of the problems of the world, this must seem rather minor but after six hours I am feeling grim. Does anyone have a clue what I can do? Besides sucking it in and toughing it out