I have been fooling around a little bit with color-themes and also the new emacs 24+ custom themes, and find that (perhaps because of using desktop-mode) there are certain traces of the theming that get left behind in the display even when I've restarted Emacs after trying hard to erase them.
One of these is the frequent appearance of pale stars even when org-indent-mode is turned on. See the attached screenshot for details. The initial stars in a lower-level headline are visible, as are leading stars in front of the indented text. I find this quite distracting! Does anyone know what might be causing this, how I can get rid of them, and also how I would in general go about figuring out how to identify the cause of similar appearance-related issues in Emacs?
Screenshot from 2016-11-30 15-38-34.png