Random, frequent panel crashes if desklets ever enabled

[Luke]

I am running cinnamon_1.7.4+olivia in three systems converted from Ubuntu Raring. On my main system, I had once tried out of curiosity to enable desklets from system settings, only to have them not display. I wasn't too worried about it-except from then on, the panel would on restarting cinnamon about half the time become unresponsive to the mouse, and the hot corner also disabled. Purging Cinnamon from a gnome-shell desktop and reinstalling did not help, nor did removing all non-default applets. Rolling back to version 1.7.1 DID help-and displayed a "system settings" desklet I had never seen before. I clicked on it, clicked on "remove this desklet" and it disappeared. Panel was fine. Re-updated to 1.7.4, logged out and back in, and the panel freezes were back. I replaced /usr/share/cinnamon/js/ui/desklet.js with a blank (empty) file, and deleted /usr/share/cinnamon/desklets entirely and the problem has yet to return.

When running Cinnamon from cinnamon --replace in terminal, I would get on only those instances where the panel and hot corner were unresponsive references to a line 823 in /usr/share/cinnamon/js/ui/layout.js , which is this code:

 let rect = new Meta.Rectangle({ x: x, y: y, width: w, height: h});

The exception would always be an inability to convert a decimal value somwhere around but not equal to 4 to an integer, and somewhere in all the text before it was the word "desklet" which reminded me of exactly when the problem started and what might fix it. Purging didn't remove whatever had changed when I first played with the desklets in system-settings, but removing the desklet code from cinnamon seems to have decisively fixed it. A few days use will tell. My other machines, none of which I had ever clicked on "desklets" in system-settings, never had this problem, not even once.

[John Friction (johnfriction19)]

Also affects me on a fresh install of Olivia. Occurred after I added the photo desklet and then chose a directory for photos. System hung, hard reboot, then boot to blank screen with mouse cursor. Had to use instructions from shell as shown above (thanks for this, BTW, I am fairly new and would have never figured this out!) and remove desklet related files.

[Bruno Antunes (bruno-antunes)]

In LM 17 Cinnamon when i start desklet ClowTow crash too.