A bit more information: this is some kind of problem in my GTK environment, but I have so far not found any other affected application. I have installed PCB versions 4.0.2-4, 4.0.2-1 and 20140316-3.1 and all have the same problem. I used PCB a fair bit until June this year, and I have never seen this happen before, so something has changed since then. This is a large unstable installation, upgraded almost daily.
I don't know how to proceed from here: I have an old unstable on i386 with 20140316-3.1 installed which is fine. I'm a bit reluctant to bring it up to date. How do I troubleshoot this problem?