Hover State / Visited State Issue

What you are describing is the default behaviour of an object with built-in button states. Here are the definitions for built-in states. To override this, you can try creating custom states and use trigger to shows these states as needed.

The built-in hover state is hardwired to overlay the current state of an object. If the object is in normal, visited, or selected state, that state will show through the hover state. If you want something different, you can create states with custom names, and write triggers to change the shape to whichever custom state you want. I didn't look at it, but I suspect that is what Bret did.

This behavior is written into SL, and there aren't any changes you can make to the hover state that will change it. Your only option is custom states and variables, and triggers.

I believe the Hover State reserves the properties such as text from the Normal State. You can simply duplicate what you have in Hover State, delete the original Hover State object, and then put the duplicated one to the right position. This way, Storyline won't recognize the object on Hover state as an inheritance of Normal State, but a new object. Hope this helps.