I copied and pasted some text within my document in Kword. The pasted text showed up a lighter color (almost a gray) than the previous text, as did all the text I typed in below it. Repeated attempts to change the font color did not change the appearance. Can somebody tell me what I'm doing wrong, or is this a bug i need to report? I suspect the latter; pasted text should look identical to the original.

This sounds odd, I never had such an issue myself.
Maybe you had change tracking on and new text has a different background? Did you actually see a difference in color (the RGB values) in the font dialog?

No. Now that you got back to me I went ahead and tried it again with a new document and can't reproduce... but the original document still has lighter text starting with the the copy/paste job. Repeated attempts to alter the font color have no effect; according to the font dialog the whole document is black.

Interestingly, when I open the document with OO.o it all looks normal. I tried saving it as a .doc and opening with Kword and the text all looks the way I would expect it to. It's only in it's original format, open in Kword, that it looks different. I'm not sure what to make of it, particularly since I can't reproduce in a new document.

By the way, I just tried printing the document from Kword, and the problem does carry over to the print job. The text is a nice, dark black for the first 2/3 of the page, and starting with the copy-paste job it's a sort of medium-gray color.

Could you tell me a bit more about the change tracking feature? I just went through all the menus and don't see such a thing.