Hi,

There are certain escape sequences which, when echoed to stdout or stderr
(or even stdin, weirdly enough) by an application using an instance of a 
<thing sufficiently like an xterm to behave like one>, control the
behaviour
of said terminal-emulator. They are documented in 
'/usr/share/doc/xterm/ctlseqs.txt.gz', which is part of the xterm package.

There are symbolic names for the character sequences that make up these
control sequences, since they can exist in both 7bit encoded and 8bit
encoded forms.

The sequences: 

OSC 0; STRING BEL

and

OSC 0; STRING ST

which can be passed to the termianl program by the following echo commands:

echo -ne "\033]0;STRING\007"

and 

echo -ne "\033]0;STRING\033\\"

respectively, are both supposed to set the title of a <terminal emulator>
to STRING. The BEL terminated version of the sequence works in
gnome-terminal, but the ST terminated sequence does not - my first guess
would be that gnome-terminal does not recognise that the ST sequence 
terminates a control sequence, and therefore just sits there, witing for 
the command to complete, which of course it never does.

Therefore, if I launch a gnome terminal, it gets as far as trying to emit
the ST version of the sequence (my .bashrc does this), and just hangs.

This may well apply to other control sequences that have ST and BEL as 
alternative terminators.