changing the color has no effect

also have some strange characters in all expandable areas like "input format" see the screenshot.

Nothing in the logs. and files/css is properly configured, with CSS files generated.

As soon as I disable CSS preporcessing everything works fine again.

edit: the colorwheel shows, and the thumbnail for the theme is updated correctly, but none of the changes I make to the coloring scheme is applied.

reassigning this issue to color.module.

Although what I said before is true, I have now come to realize that even if CSS preporcessing is OFF, and I change the color of the garland theme, it always changes all the thumbnails and previews, but the changes never take effect on the site itself.
See the screenshot.

(this breaks even the default blue theme once CSS preprocessing is switched on, but probably these two iissues are related, so I think once this is fixed, I can check if CSS preprocessing works fine)

ls -al in my site's root shows: drwxrwxr-x on the files folder.
It is owned by the ssh account I use to access my site. (not by apache)

ls -al in the files folder reveals:
drwxr-xr-x for the color/ folder
drwxrwxr-x for the css folder
(both of them also owned by the ssh user)

in files/color I have a subfolder called:
garland-ee1141db/
...containing:
*bg-navigation-item-hover.png
*menu-collapsed.gif
*bg-navigation-item.png
*menu-expanded.gif
*bg-bar-white.png
*bg-navigation.png
*menu-leaf.gif
*bg-bar.png
*bg-tab.png
*screenshot.png
*bg-content-left.png
*body.png
*style.css
*bg-content-right.png
*gradient-inner.png
*bg-content.png
*logo.png

The files/css folder is empty right now, as I have disabled the Preprocessing. This is not related (updating issue title)

The problem occurs with CSS preprocessing disabled and enabled.

Same behaviour in IE7, FF2 and symbian on my n80. Not related to CSS Prep. - currently disabled.

should i still try the patch?

When applying that patch, I get:

patching file includes/common.inc
Hunk #1 FAILED at 1507.
1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file includes/common.inc.rej

and the contents of common.inc.rej:

***************
*** 1507,1512 ****
        /\*([^*\\\\]|\*(?!/))+\*/ |  # Remove comments that are not CSS hacks.
        [\n\r]                       # Remove line breaks.
        >x', '\1', $data);

      // Create the CSS file.
      file_save_data($data, $csspath .'/'. $filename, FILE_EXISTS_REPLACE);
--- 1507,1514 ----
        /\*([^*\\\\]|\*(?!/))+\*/ |  # Remove comments that are not CSS hacks.
        [\n\r]                       # Remove line breaks.
        >x', '\1', $data);
+     // IE requires a space after parentheses.
+     $data = str_replace(')', ') ', $data);

      // Create the CSS file.
      file_save_data($data, $csspath .'/'. $filename, FILE_EXISTS_REPLACE);

...and the results of my status report:

Drupal 5.0-dev 
Configuration file Protected 
Cron maintenance tasks Last run 20 hours 21 min ago 
You can run cron manually. 
Database schema Up to date 
GD library bundled (2.0.28 compatible) 
MySQL database 4.1.21 
PHP 4.4.4 
Unicode library PHP Mbstring Extension 
Web server Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b 

finally my PHP config shows:
safe_mode Off Off
safe_mode_exec_dir no value no value
safe_mode_gid Off Off
safe_mode_include_dir no value no value

If you want to have a look, you can go to http://www.dieinter.net/devel/drupal and log in there.
Once loggged in , let me know and i'll make you an admin.

Right, I have updated with CVS, and the patch applied cleanly. - Has no effect though.

In the file-system page I do not see any warnings. & file transfer is Public - files are available using HTTP directly.
I can see in SSH that the files/folder are created under the files/ folder so I think access control is not the issue.

I see you registered on the site, and I made you a temp admin.

Just to confirm if I'm doing this correctly:
This is the command I use to check out HEAD:

cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal checkout drupal

is that correct?

I checked out the latest garland theme, and overwrote it. Everything is ok now, not sure what it was.

Sorry for wasting your time, and thanks for looking into this!

Note that after I enabled CSS Prep. again, the header image was broken.
I applied the CSS whitespace patch again, and it works like a charm.