remote XOpenDisplay in Solaris (SunOS 5.6)

["Jerry Miller" <gmiller at cs dot sunysb dot edu>]

Does anyone have an idea why Motif applications that
used to run either locally or with a remote display now
only work locally, causing a Segmentation fault as soon
as XtVaAppInitialize () (or its more primitive component,
XOpenDisplay()) is called in a remote-display run?

I am able to run the PC (Interix) version of the same
software with either a local (HWM) or remote (olwm)
display, but the Solaris versions bomb on a remote
display attempt.  Older, less complex versions of
the software do not have this problem.  When I
#define out calls from main() to other local functions,
I still have it bombing, unless I also comment out a
number of calls to external functions from the local
functions that are never called!

It almost seems as if there is a memory-management
problem, despite having 1/2Gb RAM on the Suns,
such that creating too large an executable (over 3Mb)
causes a conflict with communications overhead?!?!
The executables that don't bomb are around 2Mb.

Using gdb to try to find the answer is no help.
It does tell me that the crash (apparently) occurs
in one of many calls to strlen() from within
XtVaAppInitialize(), but with all this opaque code
(not to mention that X and Motif are flaky in lots
of other ways), that information is totally
meaningless, even in the unlikely event the
debugger isn't introducing its own uncertainty
(a la Heisenberg?)

It's hard to know exactly when this started,
because we hadn't been trying remote displays
on a daily or weekly basis.  I might try
switching from the common desktop environment
back to the openwin environment the next time
I logout, which I very seldom do.

Rather than waste any more time on trial and
error, I thought I'd see whether there's a
window manager guru out there who might
have answers or suggestions.