If I were you, I'd take all of the attributes other than the color attribute out of the hover and reserve them for text styles. You can remove the underline attribute all-together since links are inherently underlined anyway.

so, I'd do the following:

<style>
a:hover { color: #FFFFFF}
body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; font-weight: normal; color: #000000;}
.topmenulink { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; font-variant: normal;}
.bodylinks { font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none}
.whitetxt { color: #FFFFFF}
</style>

For the links, all you have to do is put the class in the <a> tag. For example: <a href=[link] class=topmenulink>Menu Text</a> or <a href=[link] class=bodylink>general link</a>
I'd only use the span for the white text. The defined body class will handle all of the general text styles for you. Then you can get rid of all of those depricated font tags!

- trs