I got the same problem with my customized theme that used Holo.Light as its parent. In grayed text Android Studio indicated that some attributes were missing. When I added these missing attributes as follows, the rendering problems went away -
<item name="android:textEditSuggestionItemLayout"></item>
<item name="android:textEditSuggestionContainerLayout"></item>
<item name="android:textEditSuggestionHighlightStyle"></item>
Even though they introduced errors in my style's theme, they caused no problems in rendering the activity designs or building my app.