Name plates should be transparent, with the text written in white at the opacity of your choice.
The issues with lighting are related to the latest batch of shaders (shader003), not the nameplate itself. It can be fixed by fooling with moving replacing a couple of the shader files with ones from an earlier shader release (shader1112), but I'm a bit wary of handing out instructions for that because the latest shaders are supposedly less problematic in general...
The reason you get GTD Orion to appear as a nameplate is because your default nameplate texture (called nameplate.*) has that text on it. Find that and replace it with a blank nameplate texture (fully transparent) unless you want every ship with no pre-assigned nameplate to be a GTD Orion.
Then you need to assign a custom nameplate for your ships with FRED2_Open by using the texture replacement (repalce the default "nameplate" with "shipname"), and it should work.