Having an xterm with widely-spaced fonts is usually an indication that you are trying to use a proportional font instead of a fixed-width font. This can confuse the X server if it can't handle proportional fonts or the fon't doesn't have the width information necessary. I don't think most xterms can handle them, but most try to display them anyway and take the safe way out to display them by allotting each character a fixed extra-wide space so the characters won't be drawn overlapping. Since the first window looks good, I would suspect you are either setting a new font as the default in your resources or the font path is being changed and it can't find the specified font.
Frank > At 09:43 AM 12/17/1998 +0100, Helge Hafting wrote: > > > >> On both of them, when X starts, > >> the default xterm window looks great, but if I open another one, the > >> window is very wide and the font is widely spaced, l i k e t h i s. > >> > >> Anyone know where I can fix second and third and etc xterm windows to look > >> like my first one? > > >