Hmm. Telling xvfb to default to a TrueColor visual did help, in that it got rid of the bogus backgrounds on all the text; but on the other hand it mysteriously caused all the images to become black and white! Serves me right for testing with Bridges which was B&W to start with. Instead, we'll just tell xvfb to use a 24-bit display and let it sort out the visuals for itself; that seems to work better. [originally from svn r7932]