To Rene, I am using 1.8.1 (typo!) To Ian, I was under the impression that the rendered font's rect would also be its coordinate location within the window. For example, I would blit it to the display's surface and the get_rect would return the exact area of the display that needed to be updated. Of course, this is the first real pygame project I've done, so I could definitely be wrong.
This is the reason that I wanted to do dirty rectangle updating... it seemed only slightly more complicated with a huge speed boost. To Brian, Thanks for the tip about the events... this solved the differences between my test script and the actual program. Unfortunately, now they both act in the same strange manner as before: the dirty rectangles don't seem to be updating unless I drag that part of the window out of the screen and back.
