And, a little more...
In firebug, if I change the selected row html to replace that 65280 that the server is generating to include my CSS:
<tr class="nt-browse-table-row ms-browse-selected-color"
then the proper (desired) background color shows up for that selected row. That seems to confirm that the CSS is correct, but that the webserver is generating that strange 65280 entry instead of ms-browse-selected-color.
And, recall that this is a static page with dynamic content, if that helps.