window decoration problem with sawfish and GNOME 2

[David Mosberger <davidm napali hpl hp com>]

[This mail didn't make it to the list because of the attachement.
 It did make it to the list archive, though, so if you want to
 see the attachment, use this URL:

  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/sawfish-list/2003-October/msg00033.html

 My apologies if you receive this more than once.]

For some time now, there has been a problem with sawfish on my ia64
machine running Debian/unstable.  I was able to narrow the problem
down somewhat, but could use some help on how to debug this further.

It's probably easiest to describe the problem with the (small) image
attached below: in the lower-right corner of the image, we have a
properly decorated gnome-terminal window.  On the left side of the
image, we see an improperly decorated xman window.  As you can see,
most of the titlebar is transparent and one of the buttons "wrapped"
to the next line, obscuring the "M" in "Manual Browser".  This button
should be the third button from the left.

This bad decoration problem occurs whenever creating a new window when
gnome-panel is running.  If I kill gnome-panel, the problem goes away
(newly created windows are properly decorated).  Similarly, even when
gnome-panel is running, I resize the window or temporarily maximize it
and then the decorations get redrawn correctly.

Clearly, there seems to be an issue with communication between
gnome-panel and sawfish.  However, if I use metacity, there is no
problem, so I don't think the problem is necessarily with gnome-panel
itself.  Also, with sawfish the decoration bug happens no matter what
theme I'm using, so it doesn't look like a theme-related bug.
Finally, the problem seems to occur with the standard Debian/unstable
sawfish (v1.0.1) and with a home-compiled sawfish (v1.3).  I currently
have gnome-panel v2.4.1 installed, but AFAIK, the bad decoration bug
has been present even with earlier versions of gnome-panel (any
version that is based on GNOME 2, I think).

I'd be interested in knowing if this issue shows on x86 or on 64-bit
platforms other than ia64.  Like I mentioned earlier, I'd very much
appreciate any tips and hints on how to debug this further.

Thanks!

	--david