Tony
Background shading can always be tricky because the shading colour you see might be background or foreground or a mixture of the two. If your style inspector is saying the pattern is solid 100% then I would expect the colour you see is foreground since the background colour is obscured by 100% foreground.
Recording a find is always odd with where it puts the With statement so you can streamline that in your code
Code:
Set wR = wDoc.Content
Set wF = wR.Find
With wF
.ClearFormatting
.Font.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
.Text = ""
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = True
Do While .Execute = True
...[lots of code]...
Loop
End With