Dead accounts don't necessarily mean the person is gone, more often then not it means they have an inactive email address. This can and often is solved when the person comes back to the site some day.

As for recoloring items, well this is something we've tossed about before, but we are almost always met with resistance from the userbase.

See this thread here - http://www.menewsha.com/forum/commun...-2nd-post.html