On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 10:25:25 -0800, "Simon J. Gerraty" writes:
>>The culprit _may_ be my window manager (fvwm95) which was
>>built back in 2002 (1.6 ?)
>
>I don't think so, I just tried again using twm that came with 3.1

Ok, looks like the issue might be ssh X forwarding.
I just ran an xterm via ssh back to the laptop itself, and also got
emacs to abort while trying to cut/paste.
Stack trace just says:

#0  0xbd99f0fb in kill () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
(gdb) bt
#0  0xbd99f0fb in kill () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
#1  0x080928d1 in fatal_error_signal ()
#2  <signal handler called>

--sjg