Contact menu in chat window doesn't draw, steals input, requires kill -9

[Dimitris Kogias]

Binary package hint: empathy

This doesn't happen 100% of the time, and reproducing it seems to require chatting with a Google Talk contact that is actually online. I tried to reproduce with a contact that's offline but couldn't, and I'm low on contacts that are happy to do Empathy debugging with me. Anyway, steps to reproduce:

- Start a chat with a contact on Google Talk.
- After some messages are exchanged, click on the chat window's Contact menu.
- The Contact menu only draws "partially", i.e. only its rectangle is drawn/filled with the background color.
- Empathy seems to have stolen keyboard and input focus desktop-wide: Alt-Tab, mouse clicks do nothing, including on other visible windows unrelated to Empathy.

Workaround:

- Switch to text console Ctrl-Alt-F1 and log in.
- Find the empathy process and kill it with kill -9.
- Switch back to Gnome desktop Alt-F7.
- Empathy can now be restarted and will behave "normally" unless the steps above are followed again.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 9 16:54:13 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: empathy 2.28.0.1-1ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-13.43-generic
SourcePackage: empathy
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-13-generic x86_64

[Leandro (leandromartinez98)]

I have the same problem, but talking with a MSN contact. Exactly the same.
I will post my apport-collect data below. This seem to happen with, and only
with, Desktop Effects on.

[Leandro (leandromartinez98)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: empathy 2.28.0.1-1ubuntu4
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-13.44-generic
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-13-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[Dimitris Kogias (dimitris-k)]

Yup, mine was with Desktop Effects on, i915 graphics.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a backtrace following the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and upload the backtrace (as an attachment) to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[Dimitris Kogias (dimitris-k)]

I haven't been able to reproduce this in the last few days. There have been updates to Xorg, telepathy components and lots of other stuff of course since then that I've kept up with on my Karmic box, so this may have been fixed. Leandro, any "luck" on your end?

[Leandro (leandromartinez98)]

Today I haven't been able to reproduce it either, but I couldn't test it much because I was actually working.
I suppose that if some days pass and we are not able to see it again it was probably a xorg bug solved
by some of the updates.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing the bug since that works now