widgets stop showing?

[Rob Stoddard <rstoddard telanetix com>]

I have been working on untangling the threads of gtk-vnc, and have 
reached a point where I am rather satisfied with my results... Except 
one strange quirky issue has appeared.

I am working on a videoconference application for Australia's medical 
system, which allows specialists in the big city to advise emergency 
room doctors and talk to patients in small towns.  This application 
includes a VNC viewer for reading whatever needs to be looked at on a 
remote PC.  The only VNC tool that was usable was the gtk-vnc, however, 
its roughshod threading caused problems with the video quality.  I 
needed to fix it so that it wouldn't stall or freeze the video during PC 
updates.

My problem appears after a lot of abuse of the system.  It only happens 
when the gtk-vnc widget has been created and destroyed numerous times.  
The problem is, widgets stop showing themselves when they are created.  
It doesn't matter whether the widget is a gtk-vnc widget, a radio button 
or a  toolbar button.  If the button has the label changed or is created 
and added, it doesn't appear.  It's plain for me to see in the debug 
information that the button is there, but it never gets its expose 
events, no visible artifact exists to prove that the button exists.

Is there something that anybody out there knows of that could cause 
this?  I am looking for brainstorm ideas here.   I am almost sure that 
it's something that I am doing wrong in gtk-vnc, but does anybody have 
similar experience with any other widget that had a similar effect, and 
knows what caused it?



Thanks for your ideas,

Rob Stoddard