Opera, sawfish and xinerama window disappears on open new tab

["Josie Imlay" <jimlay gmail com>]

When I open new tabs in opera my opera windows sometimes disappears.
Opera does not crash or issue any sort of error. This started
happening on my work computer almost 2 years ago and I stopped using
opera. It started happening on this computer when I set my wm back to
sawfish from gnome.

Once the window has vanished (it's not in alt-tab or the window list
anymore) killing opera and relaunching it does not bring the window
back. Sometimes the window border flashes. Removing my .opera or
launching opera with --nosession so that it opens with a blank page
will make it work again for a while.

The problem is very sporadic but I have narrowed it down as follows.

It's not the computer, I've had it happen on multiple debian systems
(and I believe I had it on a gentoo box I ran for a while)
It's not the specific version of opera. versions 7- the last released
build of opera all do it for me.
Switching to metacity seems to completely fix the problem
Running opera in vnc with sawfish on the computer seems to fix the problem.
Running opera on my laptop with X forwarding over ssh to the xinerama
setup fixes the problem.
modifying my xorg.conf to only have one screen seems to fix the problem
The problem is still happening when I build 1.3.2 though I haven't
tried building from a check out.

I'm expecting I'll have to fix this myself but I don't really know how
to proceed. My thought is to find a way to monitor any communication
between sawfish and opera to try and figure out exactly what the
problem is.

Josie