>I haven't tried setting column colors in a grid class for a long while, but I had thought it worked. I thought that a grid classes' preset column properties were supposed to all appear in an instance of the class. Most of them do, of course. But in vfp6, the column colors (back & fore) don't. I can't find any other properties that do not manifest as preset in the class. Can someone explain the logic here?

I'm afraid you've found a documented bug. You can get around this by coding the color changes in the grid.init event.