Window List buttons do not always respond to mouse clicks

[Tycho Lamerigts]

After upgrading to Karmic, the buttons in Window List respond to mouse clicks very erratically. Roughly half of the mouse clicks on any of the buttons are being completely ignored. There is no pattern. When clicking on all buttons in random order, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Buttons that were unresponsive will become responsive again some time later, and vice-versa. Dragging an unresponsive button and then clicking it always works. Mouse-wheel in Window List always works, as does alt-tab.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, are you sure your mouse is working correctly?

[Tycho Lamerigts (tycho-lamerigts)]

Yes the mouse is working correctly. I tried 3 of them. ;-)

[Tycho Lamerigts (tycho-lamerigts)]

I found a workaround: if I switch on Visual Effects (i.e. Compiz) then the problem goes away. If I set Visual Effects to None then the problem returns. I switched back and forth several times to verify.

[covox (covox)]

This happened to me after a Jaunty -> Karmic upgrade. The behaviour is consistent: say you move your mouse directly downwards onto an entry in the (horizontal) list. It will change to the hover colour, and clicking on that entry will work. From here moving the mouse to the left always will have no effect (the first item will remain highlighted, left clicking no longer works), whereas moving the mouse to the right will occasionally change the focus to those items with lots of tooltip flickering, and maybe allow clicks.

Since my natural action is to run the mouse pointer along the window list, this behaviour kinda sucks. Might try the "Visual Effects" trick until this bug gets fixed.

[Ezra Morris (ezramorris)]

I had the same issue as covox, but after yesterday's or today's updates (not sure which package), it now works fine for me.

[covox (covox)]

Yep, whatever magic sauce was in that update has fixed the problem. Thanks!

[Bartek (tschew)]

Unlike for Ezra and covox, none of the recent updates have helped for me. The only current workaround for me is to move the window list to another panel and back, afterward it seems to work normally.

[Julian J. M. (julianjm)]

Same problem here. Also upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic.

It's quite anoying... To be able to click on some buttons, the mouse pointer has to leave and enter the panel a least one time (usually several times), otherwise no clicks (or mouseover) events are detected.

[Andrew Scherpbier (andrew-scherpbier)]

I am experiencing the same issue. Doesn't seem to matter if Visual Effects are turned on or off.

The problem actually smells similar to a problem I have been experiencing using Eclipse (not the ubuntu packaged one...) where buttons in dialogs could not be clicked with the mouse. The problem there was that 9.10 upgraded GTK which causes some incompatibilities with SWT. I now run eclipse while setting the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS environment variable to 'true' which fixed that problem.

[tuqui (daniel-nakasone-gmail)]

Today upgraded all, but have the same issue. But can't switch On visual effects. :p

[covox (covox)]

I take back what I say earlier about it being fixed. I swear, for one boot it was working, but on every subsequent boot the errant window list behaviour has returned.

[diZzyCoDeR (nospam-compudude)]

I can confirm this behaviour, to aid in the troubleshooting, here are my notes on the subject.

had Jaunty 9.04 w/ compiz and ATI driver (FGRLX) and used Eclipse no prob.
upgraded to Karmic 9.1 and experienced Eclipse issue noted by Andrew Scherpbier above, GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS does work around that issue.
turned off compiz to allow VNC connection, noticed this Window List panel behaviour.
re-enabled compiz, problem persists
I am up-to-date aside from the samba updates available past few days.

poopy to say the least.

[diZzyCoDeR (nospam-compudude)]

..update to my previous comment.

No amount of resetting defaults etc, seemed to work; I was able to work around this problem and put my system back to a 'usable' state by uninstalling compiz and reinstalling & enabling "Extra" effects from the appearance applet.

Note, another behaviour I noticed was that moving the mouse cursor out of the panel area and then directly onto a window, this would allow click -- oops, this is behaviour noted in post #4

[bobemoe (bobemoe)]

I too can confirm this bug... It started after an upgrade to 9.10, and is still present after a clean install, although I am still using the same home folder - I may try creating a new user soon.

I can also confirm briefly moving the mouse off the bar and back on again one or more times allows a click.

I can not confirm enabling visual effects to help as everything is sooo slow after enabling and then it reverts back to disabled within a minute. I don't use visual effects anyway, but I know it used to work fast because I tried it for a while a few releases ago.

[schuetza (schuetza)]

I also can confirm this bug. Since I find this very annoying, I tried to find a circumvention using the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS env var. I had to do this for Eclipse, and I works also for the Window List.
To circumvent this problem, from a commane line just enter

env GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 gnome-panel --replace

This restarts the gnome panel and then the mouse works as desired.

[Ryan Stewart (rds6235)]

Confirmed again, and schuetza's solution fixed the problem for me:
env GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 gnome-panel --replace

[bobemoe (bobemoe)]

Yes the fix seems to work for me too, thanks schuetza! :)

I assume its not permanent?, but I haven't rebooted yet, and probably wont till the next new kernel! Where would I put the env var to make it permanent? ~/.bashrc maybe?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue seems to happen only to some users, could those having the issue give details on their config, do you use local session or a remote one, do you have transparent or translucid bars, etc?

[Tycho Lamerigts (tycho-lamerigts)]

I have everything as standard as possible, no eye-candy. I have latest nvidia drivers. I have dual-head setup. But, if GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS fixes it, doesn't that mean the Window List code should "simply" be re-compiled against a recent GDK library? If it's a compile-time problem, that should pinpoint it really quickly. As for the upstreamness, I was under the impression that I use Ubuntu so that I don't have to be aware there is such a thing as upstream, let alone that I'd have to run around posting bugs in every upstream project out there. Can Ubuntu pass this on? Seems to have more clout that way too.

[Valentijn Sessink (valentijn)]

Adding a new user ("adduser test" and configuring it roughly like my own account (no visual effects, focus follows mouse but windows don't raise), I could not reproduce the problem. So while my test was not exhaustive, I suspect a configuration issue. I will try to compare the gconf-settings from the test account with my own and report; but others may try to test a clean user as well.

Also, I tried to remove and add the windowlist applet to my own task bar; tried a "click to focus" setting; but that did not help.

[Marty (marty-supine)]

Same issue here. Mouse clicks in window list work only randomly. Alt-tab and other methods work fine.

Just tested the 'env GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 gnome-panel --replace' workaround and it fixed things for me.

[Valentijn Sessink (valentijn)]

As far as I can see, this is fixed in Lucid.

[bobemoe (bobemoe)]

Yep, confirmed fixed for me in 10.04 :D

[Tycho Lamerigts (tycho-lamerigts)]

Confirmed fixed for me in 10.04.