Unwanted cursor and menu offset/warpage

[Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com>]

My work environment is suboptimal. I do all my work on Linux machines
(they pay me to program for that general platform). However, they see
fit to plop a Windows 7 box on my desk and I've so far been unable to
convince them to give me something more suitable. My typical Emacs
setup scenario is to use PuTTY to connect to a Linux box and run Emacs
there, with DISPLAY pointed back at the Windows thing. On that box
runs something called VcXsrv.

I actually don't recall if the problem described here is recent or
ongoing, but it's pretty annoying. If, for example, I'm running an
Emacs started with -q, then click a menu item in the title bar, the
menu pops up offset several hundred pixels away from the mouse. This
is as annoying as you might suspect, but since it's so in-your-face,
it's obvious that it's happened, and I can usually move the mouse with
care to pounce on the menu before it disappears or is replaced by the
menu for the adjacent title bar entry.

Worse is the behavior of the pointer while exiting ediff-anything.
Again, with the -q flag (none of my customizations should be active,
right?) if I execute ediff-revision on a file modified from some repo,
it displays the little window/frame, but warps the cursor about 1000
pixels to the right (I have three monitors side-by-side-by-side and
configured Windows to use focus-follows-mouse because I so despised
its click-to-type semantics). Consequently, any keys I press go to the
wrong place. Once I drag the cursor back where it belongs, finish my
ediff session and quit, it warps it again.

The cursor warpage is more problematic than the offset menus because
it involves a much subtler visual change to my environment. I wonder
if anybody might have some suggestions about how to debug this issue,
or have seen and conquered either problem. (I assume they are related
because they both involve screen addressing offsets, but they may well
not be.)

I am going to take a plunge into WinEmacs, see if it behaves any
better in this regard, and see how well it works with Tramp. Of
course, most of the files, directories and mount points I use on Linux
are invisible to Windows...

Skip