Comment 10 for bug 1076393

The description of the bug fits ongoing problems I have experienced in Ubuntu 12.04 for several months.

When several programs are running (Thunderbird, Chromium and evince are frequently used on my system) compiz seems to stop responding. The cursor continues to move with the mouse movement but the rest of the screen is inactive and unresponsive to input. The keyboard is unresponsive except that I can ctrl-Fn to another terminal and pull up sudo top. It seems there is little activity but compiz is active. Nothing seems to be abnormal except the X-window display is unresponsive as described.

My solution has been to kill compiz with signal 3. When returning to the X-window (ctrl-F7 typically) the interface will reset and allow me to continue to work after the screen redraws. Compiz restarts itself and the applications I had open redraw albeit not in the same position or retaining their virtual window space.

 If X-windows becomes unresponsive again (except for the cursor) I can switch to the terminal and kill compiz again. At some point this will fail to work and something about compiz restarting itself seems to fail. Apport never gets involved as there is no crash (I'm not sure how to trigger apport to report the issue).

If this quasi-crash or freeze happening to others it may be unreported and lead to user frustration and abandonment of compiz based interfaces or ubuntu altogether. My suggestion is to formalize the python script suggested by Davideddu.

I have been using this solution over the last 9 to 12 months. In the last week after my latest aptitude upgrade I have had to use this rescue method at typically twice an hour. The latest trigger seems to be when evince (3.4.0-0ubuntu1) is trying to startup or render a pdf.

This problem could use some heat. I'd like to help but am not sure how I can.