Comment 2 for bug 616828

Not sure if this will help or not, but my ~tcross/vm/custom branch has been modified so that all faces are 'real' defface definitions rather than a variable just holding a face name. For example, vm-summary-highlighted-face. I've set the default in my branch for both vm-summary-highlighted-face and vm-summary-selected face to inverse-video. Both appear to work correctly i.e. inverse video for the current message regardless of the value of vm-summary-enable-faces.

You might want to try out my branch as having the ability to modify face attributes via customize may be a useful way to experiment with various face configurations. My branch is currently in sync with VM trunk.

Note that I've not yet started any testing with xemacs, so there could be issues there.