Hi Alex,
sorry, this was our fault - we gave you an incomplete description of how to create a .annot file. When you export an annotation, it exports all labels *that have been assigned to a structure* into the .annot file. The way you do the assignment is you bring up the labels window (window->view->labels), and assign each label to a structure and it's associated color. If you want to modify the set of available structures (and their colors), then you should create a new file in the same format as $FREESURFER_HOME/FreeSurferColorLUT.txt
and do file->load color table in tksurfer I think.
Kevin: anything to add to this?
sorry for the confusion.
Bruce