Pointer images wrong at 16bpp?

In my .emacs, I have a variation of default.emacs code that sets the gc glyph to `recycle.xpm': (set-glyph-image gc-pointer-glyph (expand-file-name "recycle.xpm" data-directory)) However, the colors don't come out right -- the recycle symbol pointer comes out in a single sickly darkish green tone, instead of the nice color. In fact, it looks the way it used to look look on my 8bit display when I would run out of colors. As I run under a 16bpp TrueColor display, that should be moderately impossible. To prove the latter point, inserting it in a buffer results in nice colors. So I wonder if there is an explanation for that. Does the code that instantiates pointers differ from the code that handles buffer images? Oh yes, I've also tried replacing "recycle.xpm" with "recycle2.xpm"; the result was a smaller *black* recycle symbol instead of green. :-(