Color turns to shades of grey in mid-drawing

[Guest]

This has happened before, it happened yesterday, I managed to fix it, and/but now it's happening again. I'm drawing an object in Illustrator 2018, everything's working  fine, and I put a red outline around the object. But the line, both in the drawing and in the tools pallet foreground/background indicator, is not red but grey. Clearly, this is a bit of a non-starter. I check the Document Color Mode, and it's still RGB; the Adobe color picker is still telling me to expect a red line. But the line is grey, as if the object is in color, but the outline is is in halftone. Any idea what is going on? When I "fixed"it, yesterday, it was by trashing the prefs, which meant saving the drawing, closing the app, trashing the prefs, re-opening the app, re-setting the prefs, yadda yadda yadda. Am I going to be stuck with doing that every time this happens, as-clearly-it will, or is there some other way to prevent this? Is it a GPU issue?

[Jacob Bugge]

Birck,

Ctrl/Cmd+E will show you whether it is a GPU issue, it might very well be, I believe.

[Guest]

Thanks for the tip. I found another workaround for the problem- make a second copy of the object with its disgusting grey outline, ditch the fill on the copy, THEN change the outline to the color I want. It's as if i can't have both a color fill and a color outline in one go?

[Jacob Bugge]

That is some kind of faultiness, Birck.

I presume the outline is the stroke.

[Guest]

Yes. The outline is the stroke. I have even gone so far as to switch out the video card for a newer, more powerful one than the Standard 5770. I had it sitting out, so I took this as a sign it was time to re-install the Nvidia board. That took about 45 minutes, went fine, with a fresh driver, but the problem remains. So the GPU is now upgraded, and I still can't designate a color stroke for a color fill. It seems as if, if the stroke starts life as a black-to-grey line, as these did, that's it. No colors need apply. Black or grey forever. So it isn't a problem generated by the GPU hardware.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

I finally chucked Illustrator, reinstalled it from CC, reopened the files and tried the same thing again. This time it worked. So the problem is some kind of kink in Illustrator that enables this to happen. I hope the "fix" stays, but if it doesn't, I'll just have to go through all this again.

[Jacob Bugge]

Thank you for sharing, Birck.

I ought to have thought of the list, sorry.