Gnome Shell randomly loses focus - keyboard not functional

[Lasse Kärkkäinen]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open a new terminal window
2. If title bar still display "Terminal" (application name) and your keyboard works, repeat step 1 (less than ten times should be enough, often it occurs on first try)
3. No application name is displayed on top bar. Your newly opened terminal window appears unfocused (hollow cursor).
4. Keyboard is not working at all (e.g. Alt+Tab does nothing).
5. Use mouse to click and focus any element on the desktop to restore normal keyboard functionality.

Workaround:

Use gnome-tweak-tool to set focus follow mode to "Mouse" or "Sloppy", rather than the default "Click", and restart Gnome Shell so that the change takes effect. Now any element under the cursor will automatically get focused, avoiding steps 3-5 above.

Background:

I cannot remember when it began but I've had this problem for a very long time. Disabling all extensions or creating a new fresh user account doesn't seem to help. Currently running Gnome 3.10.2.1 (from Gnome PPA, I believe) on Ubuntu 13.10, but the problem also occurs on older versions shipped with Ubuntu, and also older versions of Ubuntu, I believe. Perhaps there are some leftovers from doing do-release-upgrades rather than clean reinstalls?

I've done a fair amount of googling but apparently only a few people seem to be suffering of this. Here's one report from a similar problem (closing all windows loses keyboard focus), and that's where I got the workaround from: http://askubuntu.com/questions/371101/gnome-3-loses-focus-after-closing-all-open-windows

[Lasse Kärkkäinen (tronic+mb48)]

Uninstalling the maximus package seems to resolve this issue. Given that, there might still be a problem within Gnome Shell itself, only triggered by Maximus promptly resizing newly created windows. It looks like a race condition between Maximus and Gnome Shell.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.