Basically, once I enable lighting an a single ambient light, the function glColor4f (and so on) has no effect when I draw polys. That isn''t to say there is no colour at all ... if I make the ambient light green, there''s certainly green in the picture. But if I have ambient to { 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f } and glColor4f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f) ... all I get is shaded white/gray. What''s up with that? - Ben

Look into setting proper surface materials, or to use glColour* again use glEnable(GL_COLOUR_MATERIAL) and its associated functions (probably just bind ambient and diffuse to the vertex colour and set specular as white).