Application windows disappear when others are shown or closed

[rjaamour parasoft com (Rami Jaamour)]

I'm using SuSE 10.1, which comes with GNome 2.12.2. The machine is an
Intel x86-64, ATI x300.

I have a strange problem where application windows disappear from
without a trace while the process remains running. The problem affects a
wide range of applications: nautilus, terminal, firefox, java apps,
eclipse, etc.

The problem is very unpredictable, but it usually happens when one app
shows a dialog, closes a dialog, or when a window is closed.  These
events suddenly kill the parent window of the same application and often
kill other application windows too! Sometimes this includes the
gnome-panel disappearing, and also all desktop icons.

When I open the GNOME system monitor, I can see that the disappeared
window processes are still running, but I can't find a way to resurrect
their windows back to bring them to the front. However, if the window
that disappeared is something like firefox or gedit, then these can get
resurrected when I hit a link (to open a new tab in firefox) or open a
new text document because as you know, these actions reuse the same
running instance so it merely brings the current process window to the
front; this tells me that the app process is still running fine, but
it's just that its window is gone for some reason!  The disappeared
windows are not listed in neither window selector or window panel.

When I log off, I sometimes notice the disappeared windows flashing back
quickly - but I'm not sure about this.

My questions is:
1) on the short term, as a workaround, is there some signal or a way to
tell a process to show its window again or bring it to the front?
2) Is this a known bug? Or is it an xorg issue, not a GNome issue? I
tried googling alot, but with no success finding any similar results.

I have a similar system at home on an AMD 32 machine, but without such
problems.

Please help! this is really hurting my productivity and if it continues
then I may have no choice but to switch to Windows!! It keeps killing my
eclipse and other apps!

Thanks,
Rami