Do not worry John, just get better.
There are a number of colour settings like this, and glColor3f seems to be the only type used:
glColor3f 1#, 0#, 0#
Three floating point values for R,G,B and they are used for filling polygons, such as when an element is selected and it appears red.
I have done a few experiments with it. However, I suspect that in the case of a coloured polygon the program cannot translate the colour value from the file (in the colour box) into something meaningful in terms of display.

Tony