Simply follow the directions in my previous post. If you reset the ActiveRowAppearance.BackColor, then the ActiveRow will not apply any BackColor and all of the cells in the row will maintain whatever colors they were already using.  

Ok, let's say I have three columns.  Two of them have a white background, one of them has a yellow background.  How can I set the properties of ActiveRowAppearance such that when a row is active, the white columns remain white and the yellow column remains yellow?  Whenever I set ActiveRowAppearance, those are the colors for the entire row.  I want to preserve the original colors.  I'd like ActiveRows to look no different than inactive rows.

    What you are seeing is not selection. That is the ActiveRow. Active and Selected are two different things. By default, the grid allows you to select multiple rows. Setting SelectTypeRow to None disables row selection, but it has no effect on the ActiveRow. 

    What you need to do is go to the grid properties at design-time and go to DisplayLayout.Override.ActiveRowAppearance and ActiveCellAppearance. Reset these two properties to turn off the default appearance on the active row which makes it appear like a selected row. 

Mike: 

This doesn't seem to do anything.  In fact, if you take a blank form, put a grid on it, set NO properties, bind it to a datatable and run it, you'll see that you get row selection and editable cells.  If you set grid.displaylayout.override.selecttyperow to none and then run it again, the grid appears to run NO differently.  I'm not sure what this property actually does; I cant seem to see it.