"Unresolved inheritance operation"

Please excuse my mailing an inquiry to this list that isn't really about xemacs betas per se. I'm hoping that the emacs and X expertise of the people who work on xemacs will help me track down a problem that's keeping me from using Xemacs, though. I've been using MkLinux on a PowerTowerPro for about six months now. Once I got MkLinux up, and installed X11R6.3, I set it to boot at level 5, with xdm taking over the display. That's worked fine until last week. I've been following the xemacs betas since beta 34, and (with some help from others on this list) I've built and run most of the betas since, through b46 ("Toggenburg"). Apart from some compiling problems, these have built and run smoothly, and I use Xemacs for most of my real work. Last week, I rebooted my machine, and some things seem to have been corrupted at that point. The principal symptom was that xdm refused to start: the boot process gets to that point, puts up the initial screen (with the "X" in the center) and immediately bails out, goes back (to the console screen) and tries to start xdm again, etc. without ever getting anywhere. The same thing happens if I try to change the boot level (with "telinit 5") when xdm isn't running. By changing the boot level (to 3, without xdm) I can get the machine to boot, and then start an X server manually (with "startx"). When I do that, nearly everything works normally: AfterStep takes over, and almost all of my X applications run fine (including exmh, which used to complain about an insecure server when xdm wasn't running). The one big exception is Xemacs. When I try to start Xemacs, it churns away briefly, and then when it tries to put up a window, exits (1) as follows: bash [48]: xemacs & [2] 643 bloch: /home/sra bash [49]: Error: Unresolved inheritance operation On the other hand, "xemacs -nw" works fine in a terminal window. This isn't unique to (any particular beta of) Xemacs - the same thing happens when I try to start up earlier betas or even emacs-19.34. The link to my xdm problem (apart from the fact that xdm and xemacs are the two things that don't work) is the following: when I try (and fail) to start xdm, I usually don't get any error messages logged to xdm's error file. But yesterday I found the following: bash [54]: cat /var/log/xdm-error.log mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2aca3020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2ade4020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2af25020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2b066020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2b1a7020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2b2e8020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2b429020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation 000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2b7ec020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2b92d020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2ba6e020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2bbaf020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2bcf0020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2be31020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2bf72020 Error: Unresolved inheritance operation mapped frame buffer (physaddr 0x92000020 size 0x140010) at 0x2c0b3020 I have no idea what caused it to log this at one point, but not otherwise. Phase of the moon perhaps. Anyway, here's my question: something seems to have been corrupted when I re-booted last week. But what is it likely to be? I re-installed all of the X11R6.3 files (from rpm files), as well as glibc library files, on the assumption that some library must be at fault. So far, no luck. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on, and how I can go about tracking it down? As is always the case when something goes badly wrong, I have two grant proposals due next week, and I desperately need Xemacs to get them written.... Thanks very much for your indulgence, and your expertise. And again, apologies if this inquiry is an abuse of the purpose of this list. --Stephen R. Anderson Professor of Linguistics, Yale University <stephen.anderson(a)yale.edu&gt;