GNU Emacs 24.5.1, OSX, Weird GUI window problem

[ivowel]

dear emacs experts---I am running Vincent Goulet's osx gnu emacs, which in turn 
is based on david caldwell's,  on osx yosemite 10.4.4.  it works well in a 
terminal.  alas, in its own gui window, it seems buggy when I want to set the 
window height.  in init.el, I have nothing but

    (setq default-frame-alist (copy-alist initial-frame-alist))

    (progn
       (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(width . 140))
       (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(height . 90)) ;; this messes up my 
screen
    )

at this point, the cursor is above the visible area, and after a while, I get 
even stranger window corruptions (with the status bar being drawn a couple of 
times).  is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

/iaw