X widgets bad sizes in twm RightTitleButton due to LANG=en_US.UTF-8 fixed by unsetting LANG or setting LANG=C

Since I got to my current employer last October, I have been suffering problems with my X setup.

First: admission: I still use twm. Or, rather: twm has been my fallback window manager for years, when other X setup breaks. As it so often does.

Instead of the widgets at the top of my windows being nice and compact:

They were "blown up":

This was particularly painful when working on my tablet PC, 1366x768.  Too much screen space lost. Got in the way of doing useful work.

I have avoided the problem all this time, 8 months, by not using my laptop except when plugged into external monitors with lots of pixels.

Well, this week I away from my external monitors.  So I figured out what the problem was.

By process of elimination:

The problem that was causing the twm RightTitleButtons to be too large was due to

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

When I unset LANG, or set LANG=C (as I have had to do elsewhere), twm works properly.

Why? I dunno.

Why do I have LANG set to en_US.UTF-8? I dunno - it was default.

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glew@ubuntu-uarch:~$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu-uarch 2.6.32-33-generic #72-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 29 21:07:13 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

But also occurred on CentOS and RedHat.

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I hate internationalization bugs.  Mainly because I worked on pre-POSIX internationalization, and *my* system never had such bugs. ;-}

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Some text that might make it easier to find this bug and fix:

X widgets bad sizes
in twm RightTitleButton
due to LANG=en_US.UTF-8
fixed by unsetting LANG or setting LANG=C

MS Outlook 2010 text selection bug - and "fix"

For quite some time now, I have been terribly frustrated using MS Outlook 2010.  It was not allowing me to select text in messages that I was reading, neither in a preview pane, now in a proper reading window.

I was only able to select text if I hit reply. In the reply email composition window I could select text.

This was frustrating.

Eventually I learned that if I hot ESCape (and possibly capslock toggle), them I could get to a mode where I could select text in a reading window.

The discussion at the following MS URL helped:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-outlook/i-cannot-highlight-text-in-microsoft-outlook-2010/7c56d72d-b163-4941-b53f-209608481eef?page=2&tm=1336417806914#footer

Helped.  Did not describe the fix precisely, although it seems that others may have followed the same path.  One poster kept asking "Does your cursor look like a hand?", and then suggested hitting ESCape.

Well, my cursor did not look like a hand. But hitting ESCape fixed the problem anyway.

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Sheesh, when I think of all the time I have wasted hitting reply to select and copy text...