gnome window goes black for no reason with CADENCE tools

[Igor_ <igor galaxy nsc com>]

Hi,

Firstly, I would like to explain a little bit of the background related 
to my problem.

In my company we are trying to replace SUN workstations
with cheaper REDHAT  LINUX workstation.
Our pilot run went through relatively smoothly.  
We had few minor issues to solve.
One issue is still open and it became a major problem 
for the deployment of the linux desktops/workstation.

Our main usage of the linux  workstation is to 
design chips, In order to do that, we are using a wide
variety of the CAD tools. One of the tools is CADENCE 
tool. Because of some historical reasons,
CADENCE tools need 8-bit pseudo color environment in order to run.

So, this was the first challenge to solve. The solution 
is relatively simple. We had to replace
original video card with the video card which supports "hardware 
overlay" ( whatever that means).MATROX G550 is such a card.  So far so good.

Now we can run our CADENCE tools with almost no glitch. I said 
"almost"...   so... this is the main
reason for this letter.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION:
The main "mixed signal" CADENCE tool DOES NOT run yet natively on LINUX. 
We have to use SUN Solaris server to run it and we display 
the result on LINUX box using, of course,
networking capabilities of the X11 server (XFree86 on linux box).  The 
only problem we have with this approach is  "blackening" of 
any CADENCE window  when  we click on gnome panel.

Clicking on gnome panel means, for example, selecting another desktop 
and then going back to the original one.

Whenever we do that, all CADENCE windows go black. The only way to make 
black windows normal is to
move a mouse between two black CADENCE windows.

This problem is there ONLY with GNOME desktop. KDE desktop works fine. 
Unfortunately, KDE desktop has OTHER issues with CADENCE. 
We have decided to standardize on GNOME, 
because the newer SUN Solaris workstation support GNOME as well.

It seems to us that gnome panel does not send to the X11 server request 
for "refresh" whenever user goes from the
desktop to panel and back. 

Is there a solution for this ?  Or, perhaps, workaround ?  Is there a 
rpm package with updated gnome ?

TECHNICAL INFO:
workstation: DELL Precision 360 with MATROX G550 video card 
OS: REDHAT 8.0
desktop: GNOME gnome-desktop-2.0.6-4 (standard from the stock RH8)

No, we can not migrate to RH9 or Fedora or RH enterprise workstation. 
The main reason for this is availability of the CAD tools.

No, VNC is not the solution either

Any help is MORE than very very appreciated

Igor

P.S:  the re is another solution.  We  could use  MS WINDOWS XP + 
hummingbird EXCEED
Believe me, WE DO NOT WANT TO DO THAT... WE WOULD LIKE to stay on LINUX