heyas; you changed the reflection colour to white and that didn't help? the reflection colour tends to override the textures/colours in preview mode, so a black reflection colour tends to mess people up. if its the black hole kinda black holes, you might need to fix degenerate facets. that's the insert key in uvmapper, i think. (check the hot key list.) but i dont think the ambient colour changes the degenerat facet black holes. in fact, those usually only show up after you render. you might try just leaving it without double faces. even though you can't see the backs of the normals in the preview, they will render okay. sometimes double-facing seems to mess things up. otherwise, i dunno.