Incidentally I have another patch for qxembed. But I do not want to apply it while you are making the XAddToSaveSet changes. See . The proposed patch is attached to the bug report. It reimplements the focus navigation with tab/backtab using a code that pays more respect to Qt. The new code makes extensive use of QWidget::focusNextPrevChild() to search suitable focus windows. Once this is done, it detects whether we have been looping around and sends the XEMBED messages as mandated by the spec. Please review. - L.