It's as if the set-face-background call is being ignored.
If I add a timer, to set the mode-line's colour a few seconds after start-up, that works fine, and the mode-line goes yellow after 5 seconds of being white:
The message that gets displayed says "mode-line's background was #efebe7". That's an off-white. Where's that coming from?
I tried adding a "(sit-for 5)" to my .emacs just before the call to set-face-background, but that didn't make any difference (other than adding 5 seconds to the startup time of course).
I'm running Emacs with "--no-site-file", so it's not a site customisation.
Also, this only seems to happen when I run Emacs in GNOME. If I use XFCE4, the mod-line is yellow from the start.
This is happening with a freshly built Emacs "--with-gtk" from CVS. If I specify "-nw" (no window system) the modeline has yellow in it from the outset, although it's in the foreground, not the background), so this is quite probably a GTK issue. I'm running GNOME
2.13.4 in the development version of Ubuntu Linux.