When an app refuses focus, the focus ends up on the desktop. When a keypress is received by the desktop, this is interpreted as a request to look up contacts beginning with that letter.

I would be a whole lot happier if applications did not attempt to mess with focus and left this to the window manager. That's what we have a window manager for. The ICCCM actually forbids you to do this unilaterally (4.2.7); you're also not supposed to be using RevertToPointerRoot or CurrentTime (see the footnotes of 4.2.7).

I'm not sure why you think I didn't explain the problem, since I went into some detail here.

To recap:

• A window can have a field called WM_HINTS.
• One of the bits in this field is called InputHint.
• If this bit is not set, the window is saying that it never wants input focus. If the window manager was to give such a window focus, the window manager would be broken.
• libsdl contains a bug which clears this bit if you set an icon on your window.
• Therefore, if you set an icon on an SDL window, the window manager will never give that window focus.
• This is correct behaviour on the part of the window manager.
• On the other hand, if you don't set an icon on the window, it doesn't matter, because Maemo is clever and will get the icon from elsewhere.
• Therefore, not setting an icon is a perfect workaround until the libsdl bug is fixed.

I don't know whether your program is suffering from a similar bug, but I can check if you like. Or you can check, if you want, by running xprop against your toplevel window.