The release was indeed 11.5. But I saw something after experimenting with it for a few minutes. I used the designer to set the background color of the line to red, saved, closed and reopened and it flipped back to black. The designer is just not saving the value and constantly left black as the background color. That doesn't explain why the white pen color didn't work, but I'm done with this now.. dodging all the powerbuilder bugs is impossible.
Edit the source directly (right-click -> Edit Source on the datawindow)... and then changed the property to make sure its background color was white...
The bold text below shows the source after my edit has been applied.
line(band=detail x1="78" y1="76" x2="1733" y2="76" name=l_bottom_dashed visible="1~tif(blank=1,0,bottom_divider)" pen.style="2" pen.width="5" pen.color="0" background.mode="2" background.color="16777215" background.transparency="0" background.gradient.color="8421504" background.gradient.transparency="0" background.gradient.angle="0" background.brushmode="0" background.gradient.repetition.mode="0" background.gradient.repetition.count="0" background.gradient.repetition.length="100" background.gradient.focus="0" background.gradient.scale="100" background.gradient.spread="100" tooltip.backcolor="134217752" tooltip.delay.initial="0" tooltip.delay.visible="32000" tooltip.enabled="0" tooltip.hasclosebutton="0" tooltip.icon="0" tooltip.isbubble="0" tooltip.maxwidth="0" tooltip.textcolor="134217751" tooltip.transparency="0" )
But I should feel lucky. This bug was nothing compared to the black and white faxing failure a month ago. That was a nightmare. Color reports from PB 11.5 do not like to be printed on monochrome printers (No dithering - lots of white text on white background). I had to add a black_and_white parameter to each and every report (using lots of expressions to change color) as well as behind-the-scenes editing of rich text color tables.