list isn't rendered good

Removing python-gnome package association, as it isn't a python-gnome bug. Please provide a screenshot of the problem so we can figure out exactly what you're describing.

Here you can see the phenomenon. So i minized gaim and reopened it and everything was white. Then I went over the contact Maarten. That's the one in the middle. See he becomes again visible.

Here can you see what happens if I scroll. So not everything gets scrolled as you can see.

I'm not sure if it is the same bug, but I have similar behaviour in the picard audio tagger. What can be seen on the screenshot can be reproduced by closing and reopening the "albums" node. When resizing the window or clicking on an entry, the control is redrawn partially or completely (depends on what you do).

I have not seen it with other applications yet (tried with gaim and keyboard preferences, but to no avail)

Any chance that both of you are using NVIDIA drivers?
Perhaps bug 74828 and bug 43267 would be relevant.

I'm using the builtin mga driver but I don't know what haytjes uses. My bug may be unrelated to his since it happens only in one application for me.

I use the newest nvidea driver (beta I suppose)

glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version string:" :
OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5.8 NVIDIA 96.31)

And it's definitely relevant to bug 43267. I'm not sure for the other one, because it is Kubuntu and I'm working on Ubuntu.

I doubt that's a GTK bug, rather a videodrive one, do you have it if you use the free "nv" driver?

is probably an unstable nvidea driver. Can't test it anymore, I installed feisty now and got no problems anymore