colors not working in terminal + movement-hooks

Hey folks, Not sure if these are bugs -- I'm running xemacs 21.4.6, the debian "testing packages" on a debian "unstable" system. I've just recently migrated to xemacs from FSF emacs, mostly happy with the experience. I'm having a little trouble with colors in the xterm, which I can't seem to activate properly. In FSF emacs, I used mail-mode to compose messages, and it gave me lovely colored highlighting of quoted text, etc. I can't seem to get this to come back, though I have finally been able to get some colors to wok, notably blue for the mode line and red/gold for highlighting marked regions. But the highlighting of, e.g., headers and quoted text in mail (or, now, the modified "post" -- I've tried both) mode, or even of comments in programming modes, eludes me. I'd heard that people have trouble with the default colors in the terminal, so I tried customizing them. No effect. All these features atually work pretty well when xemacs is called without the -nw switch; the trouble arises only in the terminal. Any ideas where I should look? I've posted my .xemacs directory online, at http://www.derailleur.org/xemacs if anyone wants to take a look. Didn't want to send all them files to the whole list, though. Another problem, which I've been able to confirm with other users, has to do with movement-related hooks to modes. For instance, this "post" mode, which was developed for use with mutt, includes a hook moving the cursor to the start of the mail text when the mode is loaded. THis doesn't seem to work most of the time; I have the impression that maybe the command is issued before text is actually read into the buffer. Is there a way to make sure text is in the buffer before actually issuing a command? I think that would solve this problem. Anyway, thanks for your help! matt