I did some further investigations on what it is exactly that causes the internationalized version to change the button heights. The old version used a default font with many wild-cards, requested a list of fully specified fonts from the X-server that matched it, and then picked the font from that list that best matched the requested point size. This fully-specified font was then saved in the settings file.
Now if the internationalize version is running from such a settings file, Everything is as it was in the old version. But as soon as there is only a single wild-card in the font name retrieved from the settings file, the height of the buttons is inreased. The height of the text widgets, however, remains the same. And this is indeed sufficient height, considering the line spacing used in them. It seems the buttons are just unnecessarily high. I wonder if this should not count as a bug in Xaw. It seems totally illogical that a different default height is taken for text widgets and buttons that contain texts in the same font! If so, the button height must be in error.
