I see this bug, too. The bug is more general: word selection is lost when a change in window focus occurs, so that you can't apply *any* formatting selections to an individual word via a dialog. The floating color palette, as per the original poster, but also the Format->Character dialog triggers the bug.
I turned off focus-follows-mouse, to see if I could 'trick' the bug by clicking on a color in the floating color palette w/o actually focusing on that window. Unfortunately, this also causes the color to apply to the entire text box when the color is clicked. Maybe this is related to click-to-focus, though. I discovered a work-around: go to View->Toolbars->Color Bar and enable the color bar, which appears at the bottom of the main window. You can color word selections using the color samples in the color bar without trouble -- likely because a change in window focus is not involved. Similarly, for font properties, you can click on the bold, italic, etc toolbar buttons to apply these to words, even though the Format->Character dialog is broken. I hope this bug is fixed soon! --scott ODOATH Marxist supercomputer ammunition blowfish Philadelphia AES Register to vote! http://www.yourvotematters.org/VerifiedVoting ( http://cscott.net/ )