[Xymon] combostatus?

[Gore, David W]

>From the man page for combo.cfg:

       A  simple  test  - e.g. "Web1.http" - results in the value "1" if
the http" test for server
       "Web1" is green, yellow or clear. It yields the value "0" if it
is red, purple or blue.

Can someone explain the thinking behind that for me?  

The reason I ask is because we are trying to reduce the number of
columns we display.  Any significant outage causes all sorts of columns
to start lighting up. This causes the width of the xymon display to
become very wide and quite unmanageable.

So we decided to experiment with combo tests and noticed a couple
things, yellow alerts do not cause the combo test to go red.  Disabling
(blue-ing) a test causes the combo test to go to red.  I blue or disable
tests so I will not see the alert, typically when one or more hosts is
going down for a maintenance. 

Perhaps I am trying to use combo test in a way it was not designed for?
Before I go looking in the code, to perhaps change what colors cause the
combo test to fire, I would like to understand the thinking behind the
combo test, assuming I cannot change the colors from a config file?

~David