I'm not sure how to disable any special effects for xmonad.  I haven't taken any steps to enable any, but they might be enabled by default.

I logged in as root and ran 'startx'. root uses the system default setup for X which consists of twm, xlock and xterm.  Attached is the result of running xtruss on emacs under these conditions.  Unfortunately this didn't seem to reduce the UnknownExtensionRequests


On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Dmitry Antipov <dmantipov@yandex.ru> wrote:
On 01/13/2014 01:35 PM, Lars Andersen wrote:

I am not familiar with X server configuration's but will try 0) if 1) and 2) aren't enough.

Do you have some 3D effects (like h/w shading or transparency) enabled in window manager?
(I'm asking because xtruss reports a lot of UnknownExtensionRequest events). If this is so,
you can try to disable them somewhere in WM configuration file(s) without touching X at all.

Also try to run twm and Emacs as the only X client (just to cease to suspect WM).

Dmitry