After trying variations of creating background color in loadView, viewWillAppear, viewDidAppear and viewDidLoad, went back to original use of code in viewDidLoad.
Found proper place for initializing the dialog in the About view (viewDidAppear).
Within the code for the BackToMain button on About, Preferences and Picker, tested ‘set to nil’ statements for various created objects to improve memory usage
Removed comented-out code throughout.