No on-screen response to keypress until press spacebar

[fergus@bonhard.uklinux.net]

Currently experiencing a weird problem in Cygwin on W2000:

In a rxvt window, both " and ' behave in the same way: pressing either key
results in nothing on the screen, but pressing either key followed by
<space> results in the expected ' or " appearing, without the space.

Exploring the symptom within an application and using readkey(), it turns
out that ' and " initially return the correct codes 39 and 34 but under
circumstances not understood and therefore not describable these change
to -88 and -76, leading to syntax errors.

There are other strange behaviours, all similar and apparently related to
the above. I know I have seen this or similar symptoms recently described,
but cannot find it. Possibly in a X context, so I'm copying this to the
cygwin-xfree list too. Can anybody please point me to the thread (and, with
any luck, explanation and solution)?

Thank you.

Fergus