Comment 3 for bug 286698

I can confirm this, too. Since upgrading to Intrepid, the icons are not scaled in the gnome-panel and in applications, they do scale correctly in the panel menu though. I use only the icons, not the rest of the theme.

/usr/share/themes/HighContrastInverse/gtk-2.0/gtkrc uses pixmap_path "/usr/share/themes/HighContrastLargePrintInverse/pixmaps", which might be obsolete. /usr/share/icons/HighContrastInverse/index.theme has "Inherits=HighContrastLargePrintInverse,gnomes"(sic), whose index.theme sets all icon types to "Fixed".

My dirty quick workaround was replacing every "Fixed" with "Scalable" in /usr/share/icons/HighContrastLargePrintInverse/index.theme