Yeah, it works, but only under FVWM or plain X. I guess ICEWM falls under these. I tried it under KDE and Gnome... doesn't work. I think the window manager somehow overrides the palette colors. I am not sure, and very confused. In fact I don't know what I must do next. My application is quite large, and I don't feel like changing all Frames, top levels, etc. to have an option for background and foreground ... I know that you can recursively change all children's background for instance. But not all my windows are loaded... I load them dynamically. My application works fine in FVWM. I would appreciate any input. Thanks Zentara.