labels prevent keyboard input to entry and text widgets

After upgrading to Tcl/Tk 8.4.9 on Suse 9.3, I find the
following strange behavior. Certain Tk applications
now refuse to take any input from the keyboard.
Buttons and Menus work fine, but when I give a text or
entry widget the focus, none of my keystrokes seem to
get through.

Here is a script that illustrates the problem:

#!/usr/local/bin/wish

text .en
label .status -text "Hello World"
pack .en
pack .status

Strangely, if you switch the order of the "pack .en"and
"pack .status" commands, it works fine.

I have tried this with different window managers to no
effect. However, if I Iog in remotely (using SSH) to a
machine running tcl/tk 8.4.6, it runs fine. Similarly,
if from a different machine I log in to the machine
using 8.4.9 and run this script, it works fine over
remote X.

Thanks for any help.

Robert Marmorstein
rmmarm@cs.wm.edu