A rather puzzling gnome problem

[Garrett Klein]

Hello all,

After reinstalling Gentoo twice and still eventually encountering this
same strange gnome problem, I figured it was time to pass this along to
the knowledgable folks on this list. For reference, I'm on a duel-core
AMD system, using gnome-2.16 with an svn orca version (newer revisions
don't apper to fix this) and espeak-1.25 with the orca espeak driver.

What happens is this. After about 15 minutes or so of leaving gnome/orca
idle (I still work on text consoles a lot), the keyboard in gnome stops
responding. Orca still speaks in gaim, but nothing else works, not even
alt-f2 and typing 'gnome-terminal.' The only way to regain the keyboard
is through /etc/init.d/xdm restart.

One possible reason for this problem might have been the upgrade to
glibc-2.5-r3 from glibc-2.5-r2 (although if a minor package revision
causes this much trouble, that's not good). Is there any way to trace
the entirety of my x session, like a strace-type program that will just
trace all the interwoven X programs that make up a gnome session?
.xsession-errors and /var/log/Xorg.0.log tell me nothing.

If anyone could give me suggestions on how to at least pin down what is
causding this issue, I might be able to file a bug report with the
gentoo folks and see a solution found. If anyone needs (e.g.) my
/etc/make.conf, email me off-list.

Thanks in advance,
Garrett