The "hidden stars" colour is determined by the "org-hide" face which
defaults to white. The easiest way for you is to start emacs with the
"-rv" switch when you are using Putty.

Thanks for the info. I have installed emacs-goodies-el, inserted the following line in .emacs

(require 'color-theme)

Then I selected a color theme which the color of leading extra stars same as the background giving an illusion of non-existence.

However, as I wanted to indent too, it added extra stars in the line. To be precise, each line has now (2 * line_no -1) no. stars. Why is it like this?

--
Sincerely,

Ashfaq