[Solved] I can't get vim to save my selected colour theme

Question

Have pity upon a Vim acolyte!  I have looked through the Arch Wiki documentation and I have completed vim's excellent "vimtutor" program.  Both have been immensely helpful but I still have these issues and I'm not sure where to look for the solutions for the following two issues.
I'm trying to get to grips with Vim but I'm having an issue where my Gvim/GUI editor-of-choice will not save my choice of theme or colours that I selected within the application's GUI.  I have installed Gvim and vim-qt-git from the AUR.  I have no .vimrc file and the default .viminfo file is in my home directory.
What I have tried by picking a theme within the GUI:
I installed Gvim, again I picked a theme, quit and re-started the program.  Result:  Upon re-starting vim-qt-git my theme colurs are back to the default theme it uses when running it for the first time.
I installed *only* vim-qt-git, ran it, picked a colour theme and exited the application.  Result:  same as a above. 
I ran vim-qt-git and I picked a theme, made a dummy document, saved the document and quit vim-qt-git.  Result:  after re-starting it my coloured theme is once again the default theme. 
Could someone also please tell me how to get rid of the second/original screen at the bottom of my vim document when I try to invoke the ":help user-manual" command?  The manual comes up but below it is another area (is that what's referred to as a "buffer?") which is a blank space.
Edit - fixed typo in title
Last edited by MoonSwan (2014-11-01 21:17:34)

Answer 1

@ids1024, I see what you're saying.
@jwr, yes, I realise a GUI app has to save its settings somewhere.  However, even if I make a blank .vimrc file the GUI versions of Vim don't get written to it.  I did find a qVim folder under .config/Vim/qVim.conf.  Unfortunately all that is contained in that file is some sort of coding.  See here:
:~: cat .config/Vim/qVim.conf
[mainwindow]
state=@ByteArray(\0\0\0\xff\0\0\0\0\xfd\0\0\0\0\0\0\x6@\0\0\x3\xd6\0\0\0\x4\0\0\0\x4\0\0\0\b\0\0\0\b\xfc\0\0\0\x1\0\0\0\x2\0\0\0\x2\0\0\0\xe\0t\0o\0o\0l\0\x62\0\x61\0r\x1\0\0\0\0\xff\xff\xff\xff\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\xe\0t\0\x61\0\x62\0l\0i\0n\0\x65\0\0\0\x2\x9e\xff\xff\xff\xff\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0)
So that logic does seem to point to the hypothesis (fact?)  that all configuration is done in ~/.vimrc, whether it is using a GUI or just the console version of Vim.