Cygwin non-US or indirect characters don't work in xterm on extra monitor

I have run into this freaky thing in two places now, on a Windows 7 and an XP machine.

I have a laptop with an extra monitor connected. I start up cygwin's x-server, using the start menu shortcut (Cygwin-X/XWin Server). I then start an xterm by right-click the X icon in the icon tray at the bottom right, and selecting Applica开发者_StackOverflow社区tions/xterm.

I get an xterm. In it I can type text, but depending on which monitor the xterm window resides, all characters that require two keypresses on my swedish keyboard (example: "~" requires me to first press alt+the key marked "^ ¨ ~" and then press space, rendering a single ~ on the screen) result in a space being printed.

If I move the xterm to the other monitor, I am suddenly able to type a ~ in the xterm. Move it back to the previous monitor, and I can't type ~ anymore.

Weird or what? This is the problem I have now, on my XP laptop. On my Windows7 laptop (same basic setup) I had the problem that I could only type stuff like åäö (not indirect/combined characters - I have keys marked å, ä and ö respectively on my keyboard) on one monitor, not the other.

I have messed around with different ways to start up the X Server, I think I am doing it the right way as I describe here.

My cygwin installation is maybe a year old on both machines. I would like to be able to find whatever setting causes this behaviour, so I can handle it should I come across similar problems in the future.

Any ideas?

Edit: some stuff that looked like html tags got mangled.

Since this seems to be a problem only with xterm, as a simple workaround I would suggest using some other terminal emulator instead of xterm. On Cygwin, a really nice substitute is mintty (available as a Cygwin package from within Cygwin setup). I stopped using xterm in favor of mintty some time ago because I found it to simply be an all-around more useful terminal emulator.

As a possible side benefit of using mintty, if xterm is the only X application you typically use, then you don't even need to run an X server any more because mintty is not an X application.