XTerms and /dev/pts

[John & Trudy Phillips]

I an not able to start an "xterm" as apposed to the 
gnome-terminal.  This is an inconvenience under normal
X sessions, but also means that the "safe session" does
not work.

On starting an xterm, either as a normal user or as root
I get the message:

xterm: fatal pty error 23 (errno=22) on tty /dev/pts/3

The gnome-terminal, or perhaps gnome-pty-helper, is able
to create /dev/pts/<nn> device files.

Anyone using xterm successfully?

Any hints?