UITableView background color does not change

You also need to set your UITableView's backgroundView property to nil on recent (since 3.2) versions of iOS.

As such, adding...

tbView.backgroundView = nil;

...should sort your problems.

That said, if you want to maintain compatibilty with pre-3.2 devices, you should check for the existence of this via the instancesRespondToSelector method before calling it.

Make sure you have the following 3 options set:

tbView.opaque = NO;
tbView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
tbView.backgroundView  = nil;