> I am using Gnome2, KDE and MATE on a fresh Gentoo system. In my
> .emacs I have:
>
> (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(background-color . "#333333"))
> (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(foreground-color . "White"))
> (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(cursor-color . "White"))
>
> Whenever I use MATE or KDE, emacs fails to set the background color
> to Green(#333333), it becomes white instead and I end up with White
> one White on White :( If I open a new Frame I get my Green
> background though.
>
> This happens on 24.3.50_pre20140228 and 24.3.9999-r1 (top of repo
> tree) Tried both gtk2 and gtk3 USE flags

Sounds similar to several other bug reports since the regression was
introduced in December. Most discussion is at
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=16694 .

Chong, it would be nice if you could opine about the problem and
Matthias's patches. The offending commit was:

15e14b165dcbc6566a0459b0d5e66f89080f569e is the first bad commit
commit 15e14b165dcbc6566a0459b0d5e66f89080f569e
Author: Chong Yidong <cyd <at> gnu.org>
Date:   Sat Dec 21 23:31:09 2013 +0800

    Don't make faces when loading Custom themes.

    * custom.el (custom-theme-recalc-face): Do nothing if the face is
    undefined.  Thus, theme settings for undefined faces do not take
    effect until the faces are defined with defface, the same as with
    theme variables.

    * faces.el (face-spec-set): Use face-spec-recalc in all cases.
    (face-spec-reset-face): Don't assign extra properties in temacs.
    (face-spec-recalc): Apply X resources too.