EDIT: As soon as I posted this, I received a notification about a new Preview build which fixes the issue! It looks like the original source bug was:
http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-94147
Which is fixed as of 122.745!
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As of Intellij IDEA Preview build 122.694 (of the upcoming v12 release), it appears that building ActionBarSherlock produces corrupted rendering.
I am following up with both IntelliJ and ABS folks, but I wanted to post this here for wider exposure in case anyone encounters the issue.
If you build ABS with previous versions of IntelliJ, things work great. But on the (recently released) 122.694 preview build, the action bar does not render correctly on versions of Android older that v4.0. You get corrupted rendering like the attached screenshot.
The author of ActionBarSherlock relates that he has actually seen this (rarely) on past versions of IntelliJ. But in my experimentation, as of 122.694 it is now a 100% repro. So I wonder if there is some obscure build-time race condition somewhere which is now exacerbated.
Here are the threads with relevant groups:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/actionbarsherlock/sKn3GowjGkg
http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-94417
A workaround, suggested by ABS author, is to build the library externally (via Maven etc).
The excellent folks at IntelliJ have fixed this as of 122.745!