Juce without Window or Display Manager?

We’ve started to run into problems running Juce apps on systems without window managers - and I’m told there’s something called a display manager too, apparently it’s what you log in with that then runs X.

On a machine with gnome and all the usual goodies - all fine. But with the X only machines, making a temporary window appear - such as the audio settings dialog leads to a lock-up fairly quickly. When we add a windows manager, an odd selection of windows then get decoration, whether we want it or not, such as OpenGLComponents.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Am I correct in saying the juce created windows file some sort of X meta data that the OS looks at to decide what to do?

Bruce