i see nothing wrong with doing the following (by wrong i mean no major slowdowns or rendering problems) but i could be mistaken
glEnable(GL_LIGHTING)
glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL)
glColorMaterial(GL_FRONT, GL_AMBIENT_AND_DIFFUSE);
enable vertex, normal, colour arrays
draw vertex arrays
my testing has show that using both normals and material colours leads to a speed decrease of less than half one percent which is very acceptable.
in case you’re wondering ive decided to ditch doing my own lighting and let opengl do it instead (lighten the cpu’s load) but there are certain cases where i need more control over the vertex colours than the lighting will give me, so i need to use material colours as well.
make sense?