Spurious right-to-left problem, kindly advise a fix

[Barry <bkauler goosee com>]

Hi guys,
I posted this question to the other gtk mail lists, but got no
response. There is probably a very simple solution but someone
with inside knowledge of how the right-to-left and left-to-right
code works is needed to advise me.

I'm the developer of Puppy Linux, a tiny 60M live-CD, featuring
Mozilla, Abiword, and in the next release also Gnumeric.
Up to now I have used Mandrake 9.2 as the host for compiling, and
all the GTK libs have been pulled straight from Mandrake
-- that's GTK 2.2.

Now I am using Vector Linux for compiling, and have upgraded Puppy
to Vector's GTK 2.4 files.
The upgraded Puppy works fine, except for one little problem...

The Leafpad and TEA text editors both exhibit a spurious right-to-left
text entry problem.
When I open a new file, the cursor appears on the right side.
If I type any non-alphabetic character, such as 1 2 3 " + }
the cursor stays over on the right side and entry is RTL.
If I move the cursor to next line, the characters jump to the
left side. Also while the cursor is still on the offending line if I
type any alphabetic character it immediately jumps to the left side
and becomes normal LTR -- like, I type 123a then that last "a" causes
a sudden reversal from RTL to LTR.

Now another interesting thing:
I compiled glib 2.6.1, pango 1.8.0, atk 1.9.0, gtk 2.6.1 on Mandrake
9.2 and got the same behaviour. I would have thought the infrastructure
in Mandrake, like LANG and LC_ variables, would all be setup properly.

Puppy has LANG=C, none of the "LC_" variables set.

Puppy is an English-only distro, due to its very small size, so I really
need to disable right-to-left behaviour totally.
Could anyone advise me what I should do to fix this?
-- I can't release the next version of Puppy until this is fixed!

Regards,
Barry Kauler
http://www.goosee.com/puppy