Sorry, but killing, restarting, and killing X again everytime I want to play a game is just plain unacceptible.

This is a know problem for me. But i thought its enlightenment who messed. Im solving this by switching the windows twice.. then my focus returns.

I just have enlightenment set to sloppy focus and it works for me.

100% of the time when I quit vendetta, No window has focus and the windowmanager (ratpoison in my case) is ignoring the keyboard. All I can do to recover is Ctrl-Alt-Fn back to the console and kill my X session (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace DOESN'T work but C-A-Fn DOES (and DontZap is not set)).

I expect not many people will ever see this if it's just a ratpoison interactivity issue, but I thought it might be symptomatic of a larger/deeper problem, since keyboard handover ought to be pretty well handled everywhere.

When I run in failsafe here (only xsm and a xterm), and start vendetta and quit it, I can`t type anything in the console anymore. Maybe that is a bit like that?

Try running vendetta like this:

cd [vendetta directory]
./vendetta && killall X
this way you`ll kill X after you`re done with playing vendetta

If ctl-alt-backspace doesn't work, I doubt killall X would work from within X. Try running "vendetta && killall ratpoison" and see what X does without the wm.