So, yes, that is the behavior I want.  However, a couple of things:

 

1.  I'm using IE 8 and in that demo, when I select the table, click on the highlight button, and then select a color, 90% of the time nothing happens - the color window just stays there and won't acept the mouse click input.  So you have a big bug there.

 

2.  My goal here is for the user to be able to use the editor to generate small chunks of HTML where they can easily set the background color.  Since setting a background color from the UI is not supported, I embedded all the text in the editor into a table that is 100% wide and 100% tall.  That way setting the background color on the table would have the same affect as setting the background color of the entire content area of the editor.  I am then trying to bring the ability to change the table background color forward so it is literally a one-click thing for my end users.  Telling them they have to select a table, then right click, pick the highlight option, then pick a color is like talking to a brick wall - they won't get it and we will be getting support calls.  Even if your suggestion of selecting the table and then clicking the highlight button worked correctly, it would still be two steps versus one - seems like this is something that we should be able to put into a single step pretty easily.

 

--nick