Just an FYI - the Conditional Appearances functionality is really designed to help you make things easier at design-time.

If you are going to apply appearances to your cells or rows at run-time, then it's much easier and a lot less code to simply use the InitializeRow event of the grid.

//  Populate a ConditionGroup with two separate conditions
OperatorCondition condition1 = new OperatorCondition( ConditionOperator.StartsWith, "a", false );
OperatorCondition condition2 = new OperatorCondition( ConditionOperator.StartsWith, "z", false );
ConditionGroup group = new ConditionGroup();
group.Add( condition1 );
group.Add( condition2 );

//  Create an Appearance for the conditions
Infragistics.Win.Appearance appearance = new Infragistics.Win.Appearance();
appearance.ForeColor = Color.Red;

//  Create a ConditionValueAppearance using the ConditionGroup and Appearance
//  we created above
ConditionValueAppearance valueAppearance = new ConditionValueAppearance();
valueAppearance.Add( group, appearance );

//  Assign the ConditionValueAppearance to the column's ValueBasedAppearance
this.ultraGrid.DisplayLayout.Bands[0].Columns["whatever"].ValueBasedAppearance = valueAppearance;