Sawfish doesn't place windows correctly when remembering positions. Steps to reproduce: Place new window on a different viewport and align it with a screen edge. Log out and check "save current settings". Log in again, and notice that the window has moved. Sometimes, when trying to reproduce this, sawfish also forgets everything alltogether and places all windows on the first viewport.
This might be the same as bug #19172 and bug #21732, or at least similar.
Yes, this happened to me in both GNOME and Enlightenment, however the problem was slightly different in each. I'm surprised this bug exists after this long of me experiencing it, because I've noticed it on every install of GNOME since it was initially released, and on every computer I've ever used GNOME on. It is very reproduceable, especially when running applications like Netscape or Mozilla fullscreen, and then opening a new window. As much as I love GNOME, I tired of the problem, and switched to KDE in Seawolf under Bero's advice. I'm hoping that GNOME 1.4 fixes this problem as it is too reproduceable and very bothersome.
Were you still on Sawfish 0.36 or have you tried 0.38 from 7.1.3?
Upstream as http://bugzilla.eazel.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8408 Closing in RH bugzilla
I was using stock sawfish, and then tried the one suggested in email to no avail. I also tried Enlightenment and it has the same problem indicating that it is likely code shared between the two at the source level. It was so frustrating to me to constantly be fighting GNOME that Bero convinced me to try KDE and although I favor GNOME as a developer, I am fairly desktop agnostic when I need to get work done. As such I've switched to KDE. I'm going to try GNOME out with each beta, etc. but I'm sticking with KDE until this bug is really fixed. Unfortunately for us, it seems that many people are switching to KDE. ;o( I truely believe at the core GNOME is better though, but I like things like this to just work... I'm hoping our current stuff fixes it tho.