Indeed, I no longer see this problem on Gentoo with XMonad after updating 
XEmacs from 21.4 to 21.5.31.
This can probably be resolved.

Vin, this is probably fixed by the "wedge_metacity" patch
that's been in 21.5 for ages with no complaints.  Cf

2006-04-30  Stephen J. Turnbull  <stephen@xemacs.org>
Move geometry management from EmacsFrameResize to
x_set_frame_size.

xemacs doesn't work correctly when using the tiling window
manager xmonad [1].

quote xmonad.org: 
"xmonad is a tiling window manager for X. Windows are arranged
automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap,
maximising screen use..."

So if I start xemacs under xmonad, the xemacs window is
assigned a _fixed_ width and height.

However somehow xemacs can't handle that and it goes into an
infinite loop! At least that's what it looks like because
xemacs is hardly responsive and the xemacs window "flickers" a
lot.

Fortunately xmonad has an extension [2] that enables xmonad to
respect the size hints of a window. When I enable that and
start xemacs I don't get the problem. However, I would rather
not like to use this extensions because of other reasons.

I think it's better if xemacs respects the width and height
that it is given by the window manager just like all other X
applications.

Notes:
- I can imagine that this problem also occurs with other
tiling window managers.
- Note that emacs doesn't have this problem.
- Platform: Gentoo Linux
- xemacs version: app-editors/xemacs-21.4.21,
app-xemacs/xemacs-base-2.10

regards,

Bas van Dijk, v.dijk.bas@gmail.com

P.S.

I had no idea what module to select so I just selected 'core
build'.

[1] xmonad, a tiling window manager: http://xmonad.org
[2] XMonad.Layout.LayoutHints:
http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-LayoutHints.html