Obscure IDL / sawfish window manager interactions

[Nathaniel Livesey <livesey(at)mls.jpl.nasa.gov>]

Dear All,

   This is an interesting one.  I'm running IDL 5.4 on a RedHat6.2
machine with XFree v4.0.2, and the latest Helix-Gnome with the sawfish
window manager.  When ever I put up an IDL draw window, I cannot focus
it or move it.  The only thing I can do is to `shade' it (i.e. hide
all but the title bar) using the gnome toolbar.  Once I've done that I
can unshade it and move it, until I write to it (e.g. am IDL plot
command) from which point it's stuck again!

   This seems to happen also with IDL 5.3.  However it does not happen
if I create windows using the widget commands (even if all the widget
contains is a draw widget).  xwininfo doesn't seem to spot any
difference between an ordinary draw window which doesn't work and a
widget based one which does so that's no help.

   I've probably let myself into this by running the latest bleeding
edge stuff I realise.  It seems like some bizarre interaction between
IDL and the window manager, what is IDL telling the window manager
that should make it treat its windows any differently?

   Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks,

Nathaniel

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 Nathaniel Livesey - Microwave Atmospheric Science Team
 Postal address: Mail Stop 183-701, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
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          Email: livesey@mls.jpl.nasa.gov
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