Also, when reading from stdin there is no capability to skip around. Whenever I ask ghostview to display a page, a separate ghostscript window pops up and disappears when ghostscript is done rendering the page. You must be running ghostscript 2.4 or later for ghostview to work properly. You can pick up the current copy of ghostscript from the same place you got ghostview. Ghostscript draws into a backing pixmap and copies from the pixmap to the window.
Some X servers have limited resources for pixmaps.
Creating the backing pixmap failed. Ghostview will then request backing store on the window. If the backing store request is not honored, obscured portions of the window will be lost. You might also request a smaller window by setting a smaller magstep or setting a smaller resolution. Other times it works.