The strange 1px width windows appears after several days of working

[Kole de nNix]

After several days of working (with xorg modes switching, suspend-resume cycles) strange window appears in the screen. The window has shadows, but no buttons. The window can be activated, than context menu available (alt+space). Window can be resized and moved. Window has no icon on unity dock or in compiz switch window dialog. If resized - window border appears with buttons and black background. If i close window - unity closes to and restarts after several seconds and without that window.
With compiz tools I fetch some info about this window:
Window caption - Empty
Window class - Empty
Window type - "Unity"
Window role - Empty
Window name - Empty

Screen-shoots attached.

Systme: Natty (upgraded from maverick), nvidia current driver (gf 8200 mg)

[Kole de nNix (koledennix)]

Ah! After restarting unity by closing this window the unity dock wont hide.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

I have only seen this thing once in the last month Could it be our invisible window? Not a light theme issue.

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

Sam, can you please take a look and see if you understand a cause for this?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[John P. Kiffmeyer (thatjpk)]

I've been experiencing this issue in 11.10. (#773533 actually describes my symptoms more accurately since I have no window shadows enabled, so the dead spot is invisible.)

Random, possibly helpful details:
I don't use unity or a login manager (boot to console, then log in and startx with compiz in ~/.xinit, and the unity plugin disabled in ccsm). All of my open windows when I last experienced the issue: 12 urxvt windows, two vlc windows, an lxpanel, a gkrellm, and five chromium windows. I noticed the dead area after around 11 days of uptime. The dead area existed on all of my compiz workspaces. I found that after exiting chromium, the dead area went away. It didn't come back after restarting chromium.

Chromium 16.0.912.77 (Developer Build 118311 Linux) Ubuntu 11.10
Compiz 0.9.6
gkrellm 2.3.4
lxpanel 0.5.8
VLC version 1.1.12 The Luggage (exported)
rxvt-unicode-256color 9.12-1
xorg 1:7.6+7ubuntu7.1
Linux 3.0.0-15-server

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

[John P. Kiffmeyer (thatjpk)]

Apparently, leaving the commend doesn't un-expire the ticket.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Confirmed. I get 1px windows randomly and rarely. I have not yet been able to get any information about them. Though I remember recently smspillaz mentioned that GTK (?) or something creates 1x1 windows at offset (-1, -1). You can see details of those (normally invisible) windows by running "xwininfo -all" and then clicking on various windows.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Is that still an issue in Ubuntu 12.04?

[Kole de nNix (koledennix)]

There is no issue in Ubuntu 12.04

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Unity because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Eleni Maria Stea (hikiko)]

We didn't manage to reproduce this bug, which is quite old therefore I changed its status to invalid. If you are having this issue in one of the supported Ubuntu releases (Natty is not supported anymore) please feel free to re-open a bug. Thank you!

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Interestingly I've found the same 1px windows when working on Xmir recently (no compiz/unity involved). Although on the Xorg server side they are usually flagged as invisible so are not meant to be displayed.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Or they are placed offscreen in the hope that the window manager doesn't bring them onscreen. Not sure what they're used for still.