RHEL-6 Cut Copy Paste between emacs and other windows applications crashes emacs

Issue

• Cut, copy and paste actions between emacs and other windows applications crash emacs.
• Seems to be limited to gtk applications such as firefox, thunderbird, chrome, gedit and firefox 5.
• When pasting nothing shows up, there is an error thrown in the emacs Backtrace buffer and emacs crashes.
• The Backtrace buffer, if able to be captured, contains the following:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument symbolp "compound-text")
  coding-system-base("compound-text")
  xselect-convert-to-string(PRIMARY UTF8_STRING "buffer")
  read-event()
  byte-code(...