Jan Rychter wrote: M-: (set-face-background 'default "white" (selected-frame)) It doesn't think that the display is 1-bpp. If it did, you wouldn't be able to get coloured text. This occurs when the shadow colour matches the background colour. lwlib/xlwscrollbar.c has: if (w->sb.topShadowColor == w->core.background_pixel || w->sb.bottomShadowColor == w->core.background_pixel) { /* Assume we're in mono. This code should be okay even if we're * really in color but just short on color cells -- We want the * following behavior, which has been empirically determined to * work well for all fg/bg combinations in mono: If the trough * and slider are BOTH black, then use a white top shadow and a * grey bottom shadow, otherwise use a grey top shadow and a * black bottom shadow. */ Pixel white = WhitePixelOfScreen (DefaultScreenOfDisplay (XtDisplay (w))); Pixel black = BlackPixelOfScreen (DefaultScreenOfDisplay (XtDisplay (w))); /* Note: core.background_pixel is the color of the slider ... */ if (w->core.background_pixel == black && w->sb.troughColor == black) { w->sb.topShadowColor = white; w->sb.bottomShadowPixmap = w->sb.grayPixmap; } else { w->sb.topShadowPixmap = w->sb.grayPixmap; w->sb.bottomShadowColor = black; } } You can prevent this behaviour by providing an explicit setting for the topShadowColor resource, rather than allowing it to be computed, e.g. xemacs -bg white -xrm '*topShadowColor: grey90' -- Glynn Clements <glynn.clements(a)virgin.net&gt;