emacs configuration

[Jerry A. Covington]

I have a simple problem that is driving me to distraction.  I would like to 
get my personal version of emas to revert to the default background color 
DarkSlateGrey (which is always a sort of dark green on all of my monitors)
but I can't seem to locate how to set the default background color in the 
docs.  (All kinds of other stuff, but not that!).  I can't stand that 
horrible glaring white of the new look, it burns my tender retinas quickly, 
so I am forced to individually set each frame's  background by hand.  I know 
that there must be a simple solution but I can't find it.   When I log on as 
root and run emacs It gives me the old defaults but there dosent seem to be a 
.emacs for root.  Unfortunately even deleting or renaming my local .emacs 
seems to have no effect. From this I gather that there is something in 
site-lisp or somewhere that is sabotaging me, and I don' know enough about 
emacs to figure it out without some hints.  I have the Red Hat 7.2 
distribution and everything else works just fine.  BTW emacs is my favorite 
editor when I'm on my Linux system.  Vim  drives me bats, I can never tell 
what mode I'm in..........
JAC (:^}