Bruce:

I haven't tested this but this might work;

Most of the User Preferences are stored in a set of files that start with the prefix SD. When deleting the old test data don't delete the SD* files. When copying the live data to the test folder don't including the SD* files. This should leave the test User Preferences unchanged (orange back ground color intact).

As this experiement is only being done on your test data, if it doesn't work no harm has been done. If this doesn't work then another option would be to determine which file contains the color selection and try exclusing that file from being overwritten in the same manner (sorry I don't know where the selected color is stored off the top of my head).