X seems to be recognizing my Alt keys as Alt, but sawfish is configured to use Meta for all of its shortcuts. I chose the "Standard 105-key" keyboard (not sure of the exact wording), which was the default choice during the install.
If you open up the GNOME Control Center you will see an entry under Sawfish Window Manager that says shortcuts. In this dialog you can change *any* sawfish keybinding to whatever you wish. When you edit or add a new keybinding you can even 'grab' the key by pressing the 'Grab' button and pressing the desired key.
I'm aware of how to change sawfish keybindings. The bug is that the default bindings are configured to use Meta, which most users will not have on their keyboard. Either the default bindings should change to Alt (my suggestion), or X should be configured to treat Alt as Meta.
OK - just making sure you didn't have any over-rides in yoru configuration. We skip the new 'W' key setup in sawfish and hardcode it to meta - will reassign to X for binding issue. This is a problem with X setting 105 key keyboards to use the 'Windows' key. mharris, we need to swap the windows key meta to the alt key.
There are still problems with this in Wolverine. During install, I accepted the default choice of 105-key keyboard. Most of the shortcut keys in Sawfish do not work, because they are configured for Meta, but my Alt key is interpreted as Alt, not Meta. This needs fixed, either by changing the default Sawfish bindings to use Alt, or causing Alt to be mapped to Meta. Bottom line is that selecting the default keyboard during the install should give you something that is configured correctly for most keyboards, which it doesn't seem to.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 13882 ***