troubles with afterstep 1.8 on woody

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

hello

i've been using afterstep for a long time..probably 3 years
now. on one of my machines(IBM Thinkpad T20), my afterstep
has gone sort of down hill in recent months.  Specifically,
i use afterstep 1.6 from potato(compiled on woody) and
when it loads it stalls for a REAL long time while the pager
loads. Then everything is fine. This does not occur on
2 of my other woody machines which run afterstep 1.6 as
well.

i was getting tired of it so tonight i tried working with
afterstep 1.8 and its much worse, I cannot get it to
start at all, the only thing it says is:

Detected colordepth : 16. Loading configuration

it hangs there forever.  I got it working a few times
inside Xnest, but could not get it working on the real
X server. I removed my ~/GNUstep directory to be sure it
was using a clean config, to no avail. Both 16 and 24bit
color depths are the same.

so for now im back to afterstep 1.6, which works fine
except for the significant delay when initially starting
it(the stall prevents any other things from connecting
to the X server while the pager loads).

I tried running afterstep in debug mode (--debug) but
it did not provide any more information(just that
one line).

KDE works fine ..afterstep 1.6 works fine ..my login
manager is KDM. I tried it both through KDM and through
'startx' and ~/.xinitrc ..same results everytime.

only Xnest seems to allow afterstep 1.8 to function(and
even then many times it fails with the same error)

Theres only 1 logged bug on the package which seems
totally unrelated to this.

i upgraded all my packages to the latest from woody tonight
to be sure everything was clean.

i'm really lost ..never have had afterstep do this to
me before.

any ideas are appreciated !