I didn't set the colour, it was there in the first place. I don't know what caused this if you didn't put it there...
A single [gemhead] with a [t a a ...] is good to know what is rendered in what order.
The number in the [gemhead] is good to know what is rendered in what order as well.
First the are rendered the positive numbers in increasing order (ie. first 1 then 2) then the negative numbers in decreasing order (ie. first -1 then -2). This is not specific to Windows.
Otherwise I think it's the patching order that defines what is rendered first and so on. I find this to be very confusing since you can't really see the order and it can be easily disrupted.
I've noticed that [gemhead] in subpatches are rendered out of order too, even with a numbered [gemhead]. Probably related to the order of creation of the subpatches there too.
I got rid of [text3d] because otherwise I couldn't use your patch. Feel free to put them back if you want. I think it crashes because it can't find the font. But this is more or less erratic depending on the version of GEM and Pd. We discussed this with IOhannes on IRC yesterday. He suggested this was related to the font not being found. Maybe including a font in the patch folder and specifying it to [text3d] would solve this issue.