Comment 28 for bug 317076

Ok I will post a more detailed explaination here since it is clear that this bug will never be 100% solved. Window matching is a bit of voodo magic on linux since there is no framework or unified method of doing this. So do runs windows through a blender and tries to find a launcher on the other side. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes this is really really hard (see applications which launch through a myriad of shell scripts and then run in a single process for every instance).

Now for a rundown of applications status (for common apps and reported apps)

Prism Apps - Prism is an interesting problem because it runs in a browser which is in essense the same application for every web app. Additionally it all runs in one process for all your prism apps. This means to docky, it sees these windows as belonging to a logical group and libwnck will also see them belonging to the same group.

Firefox - Works in bzr

OpenOffice.org - Oddly open office is another application that runs in a single process no matter how many instances you start of it. Therefor the same problem as prism crops up. We can get a 60% solution by matching the open office window to the first launcher, however all office apps you open after that will be grouped under that launcher until you close them all. So if you open word, you will get it linked to the word launcher, and then if you open presentation it too will be under the word icon. OpenOffice is a bitch...

Synaptic/Songbird - Works for me in bzr, if it wont work for you please give me the exec string as you see it in ps -ef and its .desktop file so I can analyze why.