sawmill and debian menus

[<mcclosk@cats.ucsc.edu>]

This may not be a debian-specific question but I think it probably is,
since it involves (at least in part) the debian-specific menu system.

I run two boxes, both with potato installed, both up to date with the
latest revisions (as of Wed evening, Nov 22nd anyway) from
proposed-updates and security.debian.org. I've been trying out sawmill
as a window-manager and liking it well. On one of the machines,
everything works smoothly. On the other, the mouse works perfectly
well for window operations, but I have no menus. Clicking the mouse on
the background image produces no output and the following
error-message (visible after the X server is killed with Ctl-Alt-Delete):

   File error
   :
   Broken pipe
   ,
   #<process
     running:
     /usr/lib/sawmill/0.20.1/i686-pc-linux-gnu/sawmill-menu

I haven't been able to figure out what difference between the two
boxes causes this differential failure. The one on which menus fail
has a custom-compiled version of kernel 2.2.17; the one on which
menus work well has a custom-compiled version of kernel 2.2.15pre19.

I tried copying:
           usr/lib/sawmill/0.20.1/i686-pc-linux-gnu/sawmill-menu
from the working box to the broken box, but that made no
difference whatever. I've tried purging and re-installing both the
menu-package and sawmill, but that makes no difference either. 

I would appreciate any guidance or advice anybody has to offer in
working this puzzle out,

Jim McCloskey