paraview freezes if Xrender disabled

[Bradley M. Froehle]

On an Ubuntu 13.04 installation, I cannot successfully use ParaView in the Xrender X11 extension is disabled. (I'm using the "gnome-fallback" desktop environment). Running paraview from the command line sucessfully brings up the ParaView GUI, but attempting to interact at all (say via "File -> Open" or clicking the "Open" icon) causes ParaView to freeze.

I'm running into this problem when trying to use ParaView over VNC. Enabling the Xrender extension is not really an option since RealVNC crashes if it is enabled. See http://kb.realvnc.com/questions/235

Steps to Reproduce
==================

Since you may not want to test this over VNC, here are instructions to reproduce w/o VNC.

Disable Xrender:

$ cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-disable-xrender.conf
Section "Extensions"
 Option "RENDER" "Disable"
EndSection

Test that the RENDER extension is disabled

$ xdpyinfo | grep RENDER
$

Then restart X and load ParaView:

$ paraview
X Error: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter) 9
  Major opcode: 62 (X_CopyArea)
  Resource id: 0x0
[... FREEZE ...]

A backtrace from where it is freezing is attached.

Work Arounds
============

Unsetting the GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID variable lets ParaView work properly. Why???

$ unset GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID
$ paraview
[... WORKS FINE ...]

Commentary
==========

I would assume that this is a bug in an upstream library (Qt?), but I haven't ran into this issue with any other application.

----

$ lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 13.04

$ apt-cache policy paraview
paraview:
  Installed: 3.98.0-1~exp1
  Candidate: 3.98.0-1~exp1
  Version table:
 *** 3.98.0-1~exp1 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ raring/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status