Exiting a game to low resolution and moving Gnome panels leaves system unusable

[clemm17]

My son tried a puzzle game I installed from games multi verse. It crashed and changed the screen resolution. The only available panel was on the bottom. That panel did have any options. A forced pull the plug reboot was the only way out of this. THIS IS THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM< NOT THE PROBLEM>
To fix this I moved the top panel to the bottom so he could at least log out and start over. I unexpanded the bottom panel. Then I moved the top panel to the bottom and it worked great. In fact I liked it so much I decided to move the top to the bottom on my own login. I did not unexpanded. I expected it to just place the panel above the bottom panel. Here is the problem:
It did NOT simply put the panel above the bottom one, it simply put the panel on top of the bottom one!!! This results in a huge computer error as to objects can not occupies the same space at the same time. Ubuntu deals with this by a blank flickering panel that is totally useless. This is the main control task bar. At this point you can not do anything. You cannot even fix this. There are no controls whatsoever. I even upgraded to a newer release and the problem is still there. I can log in under another user but all the files under the other user are still protected under the other user. I cant see any way around this except to just lose all user information, data, and settings. Im sure glad my windows system doesn't pull this crap!

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

I cannot reproduce this issue.
Can you please give the name of the game that causes the crash.
Thanks
Fabio

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Hello
You can recover your data using a live cd session.
Starting the affected user in safe mode at login screen, will give you the possibility of disable special effects ?
Thanks
Fabio

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Hi clemm17,
It appears that the previous triager did not understand your bug report. Sorry about that. Am I right in thinking that the resolution changed *because* of the game, and that you then had to move panels around to do stuff, and that in doing that, the panels moved to the same place i.e. over the top of each other, making them useless? I think I have that right, correct me if I'm wrong.
If this is still a problem for you, it would be great if you could test this with the Live CD of the development release - Natty Narwhal. You can obtain the latest CD image for this from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ . Thank you again and sorry for the previous misunderstanding.

[clemm17 (clemm)]

Its been along time , but this is basicly what was happening.
My kid played a game, at this point I dont rember which one. The game
changed the screen resoultion, and when he closed the game the
resoulution stayed the way the game had it set. The only wat to fix this
was to rebbot or log out and log back in. At the game resoultion this
left the logout icon off the screen. You either had to hard crash reboot
or move the task bars to get to the icon.
I didnt like crash booting so I decided to permantly move the panal with
the logout icon to bottom center. I dont remember exactly what order I
did it, but basicly I ended up with 2 task bar panals, at bottom center,
and the log out bar was underneath the other one. It confused the 2
panals and you could not use, or remove either one of them. I tried
everything even updating and it would no longer let me acsess or move
those panals.
I wiped the drive and reloaded a later version a couple weeks ago thus
the problem is gone.
Thanks Mike

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 16:50 +0000, Teej wrote:
> Hi clemm17,
> It appears that the previous triager did not understand your bug report. Sorry about that. Am I right in thinking that the resolution changed *because* of the game, and that you then had to move panels around to do stuff, and that in doing that, the panels moved to the same place i.e. over the top of each other, making them useless? I think I have that right, correct me if I'm wrong.
> If this is still a problem for you, it would be great if you could test this with the Live CD of the development release - Natty Narwhal. You can obtain the latest CD image for this from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ . Thank you again and sorry for the previous misunderstanding.
>
> ** Changed in: gnome-panel (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided => Medium
>

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Thanks for the quick reply. I see what the problem is. I have tested this on my machine running Natty and this issue doesn't seem to happen (for me at least). If you could test this with the Natty Live CD at http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ that would be great. Thank you.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-panel (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]