Odd window manager behaviour (and regression from Xfce-3)

[Rob Lahaye]

Hi,

For a long time I have been encountering a very odd behaviour of the Xfce window manager.
It's a little difficult to explain and that's why I haven't reported it yet.
But now I hope to find a good listener, since this odd behaviour was already
in Xfce-3 and appears to persist in Xfce-4

Important note: this odd behaviour is NOT there with KDE or Gnome as window
managers!

Another thing is, that I only see it with my graphics program 'xmgrace'
( http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ ), which is based on Motif.
I don't have that many apps depending on Motif, but another one (OpenDX)
works just find under XFce.

Some version info's:

FreeBSD OS 4.9 (most recent release)
XFree86 4.3.0
XFce 3.8.18 and 4.0.3.1
Open-Motif 2.2.2_1
Grace 5.1.13 (but any other version will do too)

OK, let me now try to explain what's the problem.

Open a dialog in Grace, which has both, a combo-box widget and a text-input-field.
Immediately after opening the dialog, I can type text into the text-input-field, by
simply clicking with the mouse somewhere in the text-input-field. So far so good.
But as soon as I have used a combo-box, I cannot anymore bring focus to a text-input-field.
Whatever I click in the text-input-field, I won't get focus there, neither will text from
my keyboard appear in the text-input-field. I found two "solutions" for this:
1) close dialog and open again.
2) click on the title-bar of the dialog, which then gives focus to the text-input-field
with a time delay of a split second.

The reason I assume the problem lies with XFce, is that neither KDE nor Gnome show this odd
behaviour, but it does occur with both, XFce 3.8.18 AND XFce 4.0.3 !!

As I myself am not at all knowledgeable on these window manager issues, I hope that someone
on this list may have a clue what is the problem here.

Best regards,
Rob.