freeze/deadlocks the GUI and window manager when keyring manager dialog pops up while applet menu is open?

[Peter Cordes]

I just had some weird behaviour from the GNOME desktop on my Intrepid laptop (x86 hardware, ath_hal wifi). I'm not sure this is the right package; it might be the fault of the window manager (compiz in my case), or something else. If anyone figures out what was actually going on, update the bug title when you reassign it to a different package.

 I was trying to suspend my laptop, but the first time I tried my swap partition wasn't active. Then it kept failing because autofs wouldn't stop. There were NFS mounts in /net, and my wifi wasn't working after the first suspend attempt. My wifi wasn't reconnecting properly, and even after asking for my password to unlock the screensaver and then the keyring (for nm-applet), it still wasn't connecting to my WEP network... (I had to unload/load ath_pci to give nm a fresh start at it, or maybe it was actually the driver's fault, and even determined use of iwconfig couldn't have got it up without a reload of the module. anyway...)

 So at one point, I had just unlocked the screensaver, and I clicked on nm-applet to drop down its menu before it got around to trying something and deciding to ask for the keyring or pop up a WEP key dialog. When it did pop up the dialog, I couldn't type in it or click to dismiss it. I think, but I can't recall exactly, that it was just the keyring prompt that was up, but after a while I tried hitting the power button, and the gnome-power-manager shutdown options dialog came up (no joy from it, either, until pressing the power button a couple more times triggered a shutdown -h). My mouse cursor could move, but I couldn't click close boxes on any windows, or drag them around, or anything. The keyboard was ineffective, too. ESC to close the shutdown dialog didn't do anything. The gnome system monitor applet was still scrolling stats, but no tooltips came up over anything, so X seemed pretty wedged. Not even CTRL+ALT+F1 worked to switch to a text console! I didn't try CTRL+ALT+Backspace before the power button unexpectedly triggered the shutdown -h.

 If something was going through all the mounts on the system, then it was probably blocking on doing something with the NFS mounts. GNOME's file selector box has a nasty habit of spinning up my normally-idle storage hard drive, so I wouldn't be surprised if some GNOME thing did something that would block on a machine with NFS mounts and a down network connection.

 If I'm unlucky and reproduce this, I'll update the bug with any more info I can provide.