I'm not sure if this is the right place but I've been searching all over the internet for hours on this now and I'm at a loss. I hope somebody here can help me.

I'm fairly new to KDE, I previously played with Gnome on Ubuntu but I wouldn't say I was ever an expert on that either. So far I'm very impressed with KDE but I'm having a problem that I can't seem to fix.

The "Alternate Background" color from my color scheme ("Obsidian Coast") is not working in the View Color set. As far as I can tell every other color is appearing correctly but in every application with lists (even KDE applications that should have no trouble using KDE color schemes) the lists alternate between a dark black and bright white. In the settings the Normal Background and Alternate Background are set to very similar dark colors so I have no idea where this white background is coming from. I've looked around and I can't think of any other setting that might be overriding it.

The White background is distracting, ugly, and makes it hard to read the text (which is using the correct color specified in the color scheme). I hope somebody can help me out here. Thanks so much!

Have you tried restarting affected applications? Sometimes applications don't react to the colour scheme changing properly.

I've tried that several times. In fact changing the color scheme was one of the first things I did with setting up my computer so this color has been in the settings long before I even installed some of the programs where I'm seeing this problem.

So as a sanity check I just changed the background to green to make sure the programs were getting anything at all from the color settings and I found something interesting. In Kopete what happens now is the background of my buddy list is green as it should be, but wherever there's a name there is a different background. One that alternates black-ish and white for each row. I did some more playing and it turned out that the way to change the background for a row in my buddy list is in the "Windows" color set not the "View" color set which is supposed to be for lits. However the alternate background is still white which appears nowhere in my settings.

Is the problem just that all these kde programs don't seem to be using the correct Color sets or at least the right values from the Color sets? I'm pretty sure everything is updated to KDE4 so I can't imagine why this would be.

Which style are you using in System Settings > Appearance > Style? I've only tested with Oxygen and Obsidian Coast worked fine then.

I'm using Obsidian Coast. But I've tried playing with other styles and even messing around with the colors manually and I can't seem to fix this. If you please try either opening Kopete and signing in to see if the rows alternate dark and white (white being the anomaly) or the Plasma Add Widget dialog. These are the two places I've most reliably seen this bug.

The Plasma "Add Widgets" dialog was Plasmafied in KDE 4.4, so I couldn't test that. In other applications with lists, including Akregator, it worked fine...

Unfortunately I couldn't test Kopete.