Gnome+VNC: gnome "eats up" Ctrl key!

[UVR <uxvxr yahoo com>]

I have a peculiar problem which I can only (and always!)
reproduce when I'm running VNC inside a Gnome2 session.
I use gnome2 on Solaris.  Here's what I'm doing (the
description is a little long, but please bear with me):

1. login 'normally'
    + this starts up a gnome session for me. Let us call
      this "main-gnome".

2. Start up a VNC session, using vncserver (version 3.3.7,
   in case it matters.
    + this starts up another gnome session, inside Xvnc.
      Let us call this "vnc-gnome"

3. Invoke vncviewer from a terminal running in main-gnome.
    + I am able to see all the applications running inside
      the vnc-gnome session. One of these apps is XEmacs.
      Focus on the XEmacs window.

4. Type "Ctrl-x Ctrl-c" to exit XEmacs.

Step 4 is where the problem occurs.  The "Ctrl" keypress
events (both) get 'eaten up' by Gnome and are not passed
through to XEmacs.  Thus the string "xc" appears in the
XEmacs buffer window and the application isn't terminated.

To determine which of 'main-gnome' and 'vnc-gnome' was
'eating up' the Ctrl keypress event, I logged out of the
machine and logged again in using 'fvwm' instead.  That
is, main-gnome was replaced with fvwm.  The vnc-gnome
session was left intact from earlier, along with the 
(still running) XEmacs.

When fvwm initialized up, I ran vncviewer again, focussed
on XEmacs again, and hit "Ctrl-x Ctrl-c" again...success!
XEmacs exited as desired!

Then the experiment was repeated with main-gnome again.
In place of XEmacs, this time, 'gvim' and 'GNUEmacs' were
run.  Again, the Ctrl- key event was not passed through 
to either of these applications.  This proves that

    - it's not an Emacs problem (gvim suffered from it too).
    - it is not the inner vnc-gnome session, but main-gnome
      which is consuming the Ctrl keypress events.


So now my question is, what is it that is causing the
main-gnome session to consume the Ctrl- keypress event
and how do I tell it to stop doing that?

Thanks in advance for any and all helpful hints.

-UVR


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com