and the same goes for Xresources Global configuration files never start with a dot, so just like you have /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients, you should have Xresources and Xresources (you don't ship those files, but the xinitrc you ship insists on looking for .Xmodmap and .Xresources. If you are worried about backward compatibility, you could be looking for both. Also, I fail to understand why since the very first versions of RH, I've always had to create an Xmodmap, or stick xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace" somewhere in the xinitrc/xsession/wherever. The problem is so obvious (shows up in vim, any other motif application like netscape, but not bash), that I can't believe that you're never seen it yourself. Is there a reason why you're not fixing this?
Ok, I tried with a clean 6.0 install, and the backspace problem is gone, but only if XkbDisable isn't defined in /etc/X11/XF86config (which means that it may still be broken for people who upgrade). While this is fine for American users, people who use high bit ASCII often end up enabling XkbDisable in order to get accents in some applications like motif applications (see http://web.fdn.fr/~tquinot/dead-keys.fr.html for more info, try babelfish because it's in French unfortunately. It would also be awesome if you considered incorporating Thomas Quinot's to libX11 that is described there). Yeah, I'm not holding my breath, but if I don't ask, I have no chance of seeing anything happening :-) (please consider at least sticking that xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace" somewhere so that this problem goes away once and for all)
Marc: I'm on both of these problems, and they should be corrected in an errata release which will follow shortly.
Fixed in errata XFree86-*-52 release.