The color issue on items is probably directly related to your database. As far as I have seen, all armor in PEQ seems to be the proper color. I am sure your items table is quite old and probably hasn't been updated in years, if ever :P If you ever wanted to fix it, GeorgeS' Item Editor has a nice color tool that will let you quickly and easily set color for armor.
And yeah, I am aware that you can give armor to NPCs, but that is not a very good option for multiple reasons. This shouldn't be too hard to get coded. It could even be done for every slot on the NPC if we wanted, but I don't really think we need to add 21 new fields to the npc_types table lol. I think 3 would be just fine
