colors not working in terminal

Hey folks, 

sent a rather maddened, sleep-deprived note last night, which I
haven't received, so hopefully it's been resigned to the abyss.  If
not, apologize for the double-posting.  

I've just recently migrated to xemacs from FSF emacs, mostly happy
with the experience.  I'm having a little trouble with colors in the
xterm, which I can't seem to activate properly.  In FSF emacs, I used
mail-mode to compose messages, and it gave me lovely colored
highlighting of quoted text, etc.  I can't seem to get this to come
back, though I have finally been able to get some colors to wok,
notably blue for the mode line and red/gold for highlighting marked
regions.  But the highlighting of, e.g., headers and quoted text in
mail (or, now, the modified "post" -- I've tried both) mode, or even
of comments in programming modes, eludes me.

I'd heard that people have trouble with the default colors in the
terminal, so I tried customizing them.  No effect.

All these features atually work pretty well when xemacs is called
without the -nw switch; the trouble arises only in the terminal.  

Any ideas where I should look?  I've posted my .xemacs directory
online, at 
http://www.derailleur.org/xemacs
if anyone wants to take a look.  Didn't want to send all them files to
the whole list, though.  

Anyway, thanks for your help!

matt