Button highlighting, middle and right buttons don't work in Xaw application on GNOME desktop

[Jonathan Kamens <jik kamens brookline ma us>]

Greetings,

I'm writing to the desktop developer list about this problem because I'm
pretty certain that you're the only group of people who has a chance of
being able to figure it out :-).

I have maintained a Usenet News Reader called XRN for more years than I
care to remember.  It is an Xaw application.

I recently bit the bullet and switched from my old, crufty X desktop,
which consisted of a few prepositioned xterm and emacs windows and the
twm window manager, to GNOME 2.18.

I'm enjoying all of the benefits of GNOME, but one thing I'm not
enjoying is that XRN doesn't work properly on the GNOME desktop.  In
particular, Xaw button widgets don't seem to function properly in at
least two ways, one aesthetic and one functional:

     1. When I move my mouse over a button, the button is supposed to
        highlight by reversing the color of a few rows of pixels inside
        the button border.  This doesn't happen.
     2. Several of my buttons have button bindings for the middle and
        right mouse button that are different from the left button
        binding.  These middle and right button bindings don't work.

I don't really care all that much about the button highlighting, but
significant application functionality is unavailable to me because I
can't use middle and right button clicks.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

  Jonathan Kamens