Turn Off Highlighting on ContextMenuStrip

This is one way to do it

You can derive your menu control from ContextMenu and set to OwnerDraw and you can override the default behavior.
Its not that hard to do and I'm sure there are articles on here that will show you how this can be done.  If I remember ContextMenuStrip does not allow you to do much in the way of doing much in the way of changing drawing behavior.

Mike