bug#9982: M-x load-theme does not change background color

[Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net>]

I think I've narrowed down the bug somewhat. There is something wrong
with the (set-background-color "color-here") function. This is a
regression from emacs 23.3 where that function works fine on the same
machine.

I tried (set-background-color "black") and this function seems very
erratic. It will succeed part way (not for all lines on buffer), but
then fail to set the color back to white on the next call. Assuming
that load-theme uses this function, I think this is probably where the
bug is.

I tried launching emacs with emacs --background-color=black, and that
succeeds in making the background color black.

This is run under emacs -Q. I tried doing a git pull and recompiling
everything just to be sure it's not already fixed.

I'm running under Arch Linux on XFCE. I followed the output of the
./configure script, and it seems I am building against GTK2 libraries.

I'll experiment a bit and see if I can narrow down the problem further.

I'm adding the diagnostic information from report-emacs-bug below. I
was having trouble sending via report-emacs-bug method directly, as it
didn't seem to like my smtp server.

In GNU Emacs 24.0.91.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.7)
 of 2011-11-07 on arch
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11101902
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: nil
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
  default enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Lisp Interaction

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t

Recent input:
M-x l o a d - t h e <tab> <return> m a n o <tab> <return>
M-x r e p o r t - b u g <tab> <return>

Recent messages:
For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.

Load-path shadows:
None found.

Features:
(shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr message format-spec rfc822 mml easymenu
mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 rfc2047 rfc2045
ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mailabbrev mail-utils gmm-utils mailheader
emacsbug manoj-dark-theme time-date tooltip ediff-hook vc-hooks
lisp-float-type mwheel x-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image fringe
lisp-mode register page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar
mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian
utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean
japanese hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian
cyrillic chinese case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev
minibuffer loaddefs button faces cus-face files text-properties overlay
sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget
hashtable-print-readable backquote make-network-process dbusbind
dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting move-toolbar gtk
x-toolkit x multi-tty emacs)