I recently upgraded gcc and glibc – why? they were there… dumb – and noticed some odd behavior in my XEmacs after doing so. It would edit files without a mode (‘Fundamental’) just fine. But once I invoked one by opening a known file type (e.g., cperl-mode for a .pm file) or by starting up PCL-CVS, the app froze with an ‘X_OpenFont’ error indicating ‘BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)’. Wacky.
Moving to a new WM fixed it, but then I figured to just give recompiling the previous WM (Sawfish) a try, plus its immediate libraries (the rep stuff). Fortunately since I'm using gentoo this was a matter of:
# emerge x11-libs/rep-gtk dev-libs/librep x11-wm/sawfish
Worked like a charm. Lots of perl coding ensues...