I had thought that one of
the benefits of the pgtk branch was that it would not have this bug,
which plagues the old Emacs GTK builds. Am I just making that up?
Adding a bit of historical perspective: it might be more accurate to say "the GTK people are unwilling to address the issue when it's caused by what some people call 'unclean gtk use' inside emacs", with the concomitant hope that they will more more receptive to a pure-gtk issue. AFAIK, the only alternative to GTK fixing the problem is something semantically very close to monkey-patching.
Hope that helps,
~Chad