GNOME Kills Unreal Tournament Performance

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

OK, here is an odd bug that I strongly believe is in some part of GNOME,
or possibly Sawmill, or possibly the Helix patches... which, I'm not
sure...

Unreal Tournament runs excellent on my Linux box if I log in as root, or
start up a 'vanilla' X session with nothing but a terminal and run the
game.  If I start up as my normal user (running GNOME), the game still
runs fairly OK, except for the mouse: it has problems going left.  It
acts like the mouse-ball is extremely dirty or something (only when
moving left, mind you), but only does this when I'm logged into my
normal user account under GNOME.

I'm running Sawmill 0.30, all the latest Helix GNOME packages; I have a
menu panel, a normal panel, and I'm running these appletS: gproc-applet,
Desktop Guide, Taskbar, Mixer app, CPU/Mem use app, net load appm and
status dock.  I use gnome-terminal to launch the game.  ONE of these has
to be causing the weird problems, since the problem doesn't exist unless
they're running.

I've tried to determine WHICH program is causing this, but so far I've
been unsuccessful (I've been removing applet, test, removing applet,
testing).

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what the problem may be?

Sean Middleditch