that depends...
X applications ask the server to draw text, and also are told to redraw
sections when a window is moved, popped, etc. On occasion (but not for
a long time) xterm could overlook one of those redrawing events.
If you'd done something that would make the screen repainted by the program
running in xterm then it would be harder to tell (but pressing enter wouldn't
do that - it sends an event, which doesn't do much).
X server (or library) problems (in particular certain new/less-tested drivers)
can cause a drawing event to be lost (and not shown).
If you have a relatively uncommon hardware or video driver, I'd suspect
that first. Problems with acceleration/animation would be X server or
perhaps libfreetype6, etc.
The "Sometimes" makes it hard - if a bug is easy to repeat, then it's
often easy to factor out where the likely problem is.
I think it could be reassigned, but am uncertain which is the most likely.