tabbar-mode brings editing to a crawling halt

Question

I today tried tabbar-mode, both version 2.0.1 obtainable via the marmelade elpa repository, and version 2.0 from dholms github repository. When tabbar-mode is activated, key

Answer 1

It's actually pretty simple; tabbar uses three icons to the left of the tabbar; glancing over the code I noticed that it meddles with transparency issues -- that raised a red flag. Setting

(setq tabbar-use-images nil)

before activating tabbar-mode replaces the icons with text - voila, everything is smooth again.