White rectangle in top left corner

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

It's a bit unclear which program is causing this, but here it goes:

The top left corner of my left screen (dual screen setup) has a white rectangle.

Using xdotool doesn't really give me a proper PID, since it yields the PID of the main nautilus window (the desktop):

$ xdotool selectwindow getwindowpid
findclient: 18874372
findclient: 18874372
21792

hildeb 21792 0.2 1.3 1526528 47448 ? Sl 08:10 0:38 nautilus -n

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: ubuntu-desktop 1.265
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-20.32-generic 3.2.12
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-20-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.95-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Mar 27 12:48:21 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-meta
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-03-19 (8 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Pete Goodall (pgoodall)]

I am seeing the exact same thing, and have so for a while. From what I can tell it has to do with Chrom{e,ium} 18.x and notifications. The white box appears when I have a gmail notifications specifically. I have been seeing this for a while, and have been trying to figure it out. From what I can tell it is not a window as you can click through it and I can't use Alt-grab to move it. It simply seems to be a region of the screen that won't repaint. Video memory corruption? Ah, I also noticed it has a drop shadow, so it kind of acts like a window - or maybe compiz is simply treating it as one.

For troubleshooting I exited Chromium (18.x) and the white rectangle doesn't go away. Even exiting all apps doesn't make it go away. It does go away if I logout and back in again. I then installed the stable version of Chrome (which was at the time 17.x). I didn't see this for a while, but it returned when Chrome was upgraded to 18.x. Further, I noticed it appears after a gmail notification comes up. Specifically, I had several gmail notifications appears in a row and the white rectangle appeared. I exited Chrome, logged out and back in again and tried to reproduce by having several people ping me in IRC (I am using a web-based irc client) but couldn't make the rectangle appear. This morning I got a single notification from gmail and the white rectangle appeared.

This appears to me to be a problem with Chromium, but I'm struggling to get good troubleshooting information as I can't get any information on the "window".

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

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 940603, 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.

[Pete Goodall (pgoodall)]

Bug #943803 seems to be the same bug.

[Ralf Hildebrandt (ralf-hildebrandt)]

> For troubleshooting I exited Chromium (18.x) and the white rectangle
> doesn't go away. Even exiting all apps doesn't make it go away. It
> does go away if I logout and back in again. I then installed the stable
> version of Chrome (which was at the time 17.x). I didn't see this for a
> while, but it returned when Chrome was upgraded to 18.x. Further, I
> noticed it appears after a gmail notification comes up. Specifically, I
> had several gmail notifications appears in a row and the white rectangle
> appeared. I exited Chrome, logged out and back in again and tried to
> reproduce by having several people ping me in IRC (I am using a web-
> based irc client) but couldn't make the rectangle appear. This morning
> I got a single notification from gmail and the white rectangle appeared.
>
> This appears to me to be a problem with Chromium, but I'm struggling to
> get good troubleshooting information as I can't get any information on
> the "window".

Same here, it's definitely something related to Chromium notifications.

[Pete Goodall (pgoodall)]

Ok. I believe this is a duplicate of Bug #940603.