"System Settings" sometimes opens invisible and makes rest of desktop mostly unresponsive

[Rachel Greenham]

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

Sometimes, apparently at random, when I open the gnome control center (these days usually by selecting "System Settings" from the powerswitch menu), it appears not to open, but in fact it has opened but is invisible. If I click/drag randomly inside the area where it would be the mouse seems to pick up one of the control center icons. Otherwise the desktop is generally unresponsive (the whole desktop, not just the area under where the window would be) and I have to ssh in from another machine (or switch to console) to killall gnome-control-center to recover. Usually then the next time I run it, it's fine.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: gnome-control-center 1:2.32.1-0ubuntu11
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-7.39-generic 2.6.38
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-7-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Mar 30 10:01:06 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-control-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-02-26 (31 days ago)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

seems to be rather a compiz issue

[Rachel Greenham (rachel-strangenoises)]

On 30/03/11 10:43, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> seems to be rather a compiz issue
>
> ** Package changed: gnome-control-center (Ubuntu) => compiz (Ubuntu)
>
Probably, though IME it only seems to affect the control center; not
seen it happen with anything else.

[Rachel Greenham (rachel-strangenoises)]

OK, just to contradict me, today the same thing happened with
gnome-power-preferences. :-)

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 709461, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.