Andreas Jaeger <aj(a)suse.de&gt; writes: Yes. This a problem with customize in 21.1. You cannot mix customize with other methods of setting the face. This is because customize basically blows away the face and makes a new one. This also hurts Mule very badly. The work around is to also set the background using customize. This is fixed in 21.2 but the fix is highly nontrivial (basically involves teaching custom about specifiers) and took quite a while to get right. Therefore it is not something that is suitable to back porting. (although it can be done, I still have a an early version of the patch running on our copies of 21.1). Jan.