Comment 108 for bug 41301

Okay, it would seem that this but has decided to hit me too.

I have never before experienced it, but ever since the last ubuntu update before 14. March, 2010 (I think it was a also new kernel image) I am suddenly getting these weird mouse problems that others have described. I can move the mouse cursor, but any mouse clicks (left or right) are mostly ignored. If I unplug and replug my usb mouse, nothing happens and the problem persists. Since I use a laptop, I am getting the same on the touchpad, so its definitely not a hardware problem. It's almost as if there was some invisible window blocking all the mouse clicks from reaching the proper windows underneath. I found out that right-clicking usually helps when menus pop up. That's when the problem normally goes away for a while. I have no idea how to reproduce it though it seems to happen randomly.

At one point I managed to run the update manager, which warned me that something is stealing focus and that somebody may be doing something malicious. Another weird example is when the firefox window was fully responsive, but everything else was dead. In third case I managed to get the bottom bar in gnome to work, but everything else was frozen.

I mostly run a gnome terminal and firefox when the bug hits. Keyboard is responsive though alt+tab doesn't work. I can do an Alt+F2 to run an xterm to gain some control and killall some unresponsive apps. On most windows I couldn't click the little X to close the window, but I could still use the other two controls to minimize and maximize it. Sometimes even those don't work and you can't click and drag the window around.

~$uname -a
Linux lprime 2.6.31-20-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Mon Feb 8 09:05:19 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux