I'm running a 1.5.2/i386 system.  Tonight I noticed something weird with
my xterms, when I tried to twiddle an option: The menus are physically too
small to present the range of options.  When I hold down <Ctrl> and push
any of the 3 mouse-buttons, I get a small rectangular window.  The menu
window is tall enough for about 2 and a half lines of menu text, and wide
enough to to see the ``t'' in ``Default'' for <Ctrl>-<button-3>.  The size
of the pop-up menu doesn't vary with the menu.

I thought that it might be something with the xterm's memory, so I started
a new xterm out of curiosity.  Same deal.  The problem persisted when I
restarted X and even after a warm boot.

My .Xdefaults file looks like:

 /~~~ .Xdefaults

*xterm*background: DarkGrey
*xterm*activeIcon: TRUE
*xterm*cursorColor: Orange
*xterm*pointerColor: Red
*xterm*pointerColorBackground: Black
*xterm*font: 9x15
*xterm*scrollBar: 1
*xterm*saveLines: 1024
*xterm*geometry: 80x58+0+0

 \___ .Xdefaults

...nothing in there has changed recently.  But, I almost never use xterm
menus, so it might have been 6 months or more since I last used an xterm
menu on this machine.  (^&  Just about any package that I've installed
(pkg_info | wc reports 212 present packages) could have gone in between
the times that xterm's menus last worked properly and the present.

(I tried removing the *xterm*font: setting, too.  That didn't fix the
problem; nor did it affect the size of the popup menu---though it allowed
more text to be seen in the (same-size) menu.)


Any suggestions or ideas?  Or am I the only one to see this kind of thing?


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu