Without adding any effects at all, any photo I drop on the timeline ends up being really blue and really bright, as if I was jacking up the blue highlights and adding brightness. Every photo is like that and I check the properties and no, not effects are in place at all. I close the application and start all over and it's the same. Any ideas?
You could have accidentally applied an effect either to the entire track (check the "FX" icon in the track header) or applied to the entire output (check the FX icon in the preview display window).
You can restore VMS to default settings by holding down the CTRL and SHIFT keys immediately after launching VMS.
In addition to what Tim L said, you could have checked the "start new projects with these settings" option. This could explain why you see the problem even after exiting and relaunching VMS.