Comment 81 for bug 467668

Hi Rob,

Per your request in bug #572617 -- my apologies for mis-posting there -- I removed my workarounds, moved my ~/.config directory to a backup location, reboot the system, and then logged back on.

This most decidedly did NOT fix the problem. Indeed, it create quite a mess, wherein, depending on what I tried to fix the mess, I'd get either (a) just a blank desktop with only my desktop background image, that is, no awn, no panels, not right-clicking on the desktop for a menu, simply nothing (in these cases, switching to tty1, I saw that compiz.decorator was running, but not compiz), or (b) a semi-normal desktop but desktop appearances set to "none" and no awn.

Regarding (b), if I selected "extra" in System > Preferences > Appearance, well, many things would happen, all of them "bad". Sometimes gnome-appeance-properties would then say "Searching for drivers" and then sometimes it would return to the Appearances dialog and other times it would say "Could not set desktop effects". At other times, gnome-appeance-properties would seem to then do something that started a run-away loop; it's hard to explain, but it *seemed* like compiz was continually restarting and/or perhaps "fighting" with metacity?

Nothing did would then restore my desktop to a functional state. Restoring my original .config directory and, either re-enabling my workarounds or not, nothing did the trick. I had to restore my home directory from the previous day and that did, finally, get me back to a working desktop.

Thus, I strongly suspect that the problem is NOT just in a user's .config directory. What all happened after I let gnome recreate a .config dir, and the fact that restoring my original .config directory did not fix the problem, are the primary reasons I think this. have other reasons to believe the problem lies not just in the .config directory, due to previous experiences that I've had, but I won't elaborate on them here.

I'm probably stating the obvious, but it seems pretty clear that it's some sort of timing / sequencing or coordination issue between multiple components, perhaps compiz and gnome/gconf, maybe even the display drivers and/or metacity?

From one of the times that I logged in and my desktop hung at displaying my background image, I've attached: (a) the last 23 lines of my dmesg file -- you can see the nvidia driver cycling, (b) my .xession-errors file from the same point in time. I observed nearly identical behavior on my < 1yr old laptop with ATI radeon 3200 HD before implementing my workaround, so I don't think this is just a driver issue, either (although perhaps an interaction).

Lastly, I did create a new users and logging in / out as that user, with desktop effects set to "extra" worked just find, and gnome did not "forget" that extra had been set for this user. I believe this tells us that the problem is limited to a users home directory, but not limited to just the .config directory.

If I have some time soon (I doubt it, but who knows), I may try tackling this in reverse: create a new user *without* the problem and see what I can do to recreate the problem.

Hope this helps, and thanks for your efforts on this.

Doug