Chromium occasionally renders unclosable blank ghost windows from pop-up menus

[Eliah Kagan]

Binary package hint: openbox

On a Lubuntu Natty amd64 system in a Lubuntu Desktop session with openbox 3.4.11.2-0ubuntu3, chromium-browser 11.0.696.71~r86024-0ubuntu0.11.04.1, and libgtk2.0-0 2.24.4-0ubuntu2, unclosable, blank (light gray), borderless ghost windows sometimes appear. These appear to be windows and not just areas where the background or foreground elements are not being drawn, as clicking or using the scroll wheel while the mouse pointer is a ghost window has no effect (in particular, it does not have the effect of clicking or scrolling in the window behind it). However, the ghost windows cannot be switched to--clicking them does not change what window is in the foreground. These ghost windows appear in front of regular windows, but behind menus, which makes sense, if they are left over from menus (as menus can typically be displayed in front of all windows, including other menus).

This seems most often to be triggered by closing a contextual menu (or sometimes an application menu). I think that every time it has happened, Google Chromium was running, and at least the first ghost window was "left behind" by a contextual menu in Chromium. I am not sure if any other applications trigger this. Closing Chromium makes the ghost windows go away, and they do not reappear when Chromium is restarted. Perhaps this bug is specific to chromium-browser, or perhaps something is going wrong in openbox as well. As detailed below, the ghost windows are not shown when openbox is not running.

My system has the default Lubuntu configuration, so openbox is run automatically in a Lubuntu Desktop session with the command line "openbox --config-file /home/ek/.config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml". (I've attached the file lubuntu-rc.xml.) I ran "openbox --config-file /home/ek/.config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml --replace", but that did not make the ghost windows go away. Quitting the new openbox process with Ctrl+C (SIGINT) made the ghost windows go away, but they returned when I restarted openbox with that same command. I quit the replacement openbox instance again, and found that the original instance of openbox was still running. I tried unsuccessfully to kill it with SIGTERM; then I successfully killed it with SIGKILL. As expected, this did not change the behavior of the windows on my desktop. Restarting openbox once again restored the ghost windows, as expected.

I've attached three screenshots. The first shows a normal desktop, with the ghost windows. The second shows an application (VLC) in full screen mode, with the ghost windows, and with a contextual menu in front of part of one of them. The third shows a desktop without the ghost windows, achieved by running openbox with the --replace flag as described above, then quitting the new instance with SIGINT.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: openbox 3.4.11.2-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-9.43-generic 2.6.38.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-9-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Jun 6 21:45:54 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/openbox
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Beta amd64 (20110413.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: openbox
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Daniel Richard G. (skunk)]

I see dead windows.

It's not just Openbox. I'm running Xubuntu (i.e. Xfce4) on Oneiric with chromium-browser 15.0.874.106~r107270-0ubuntu0.11.10.1.

The "ghost" windows clearly belong to Chromium, as running xwininfo(1)/xprop(1) on them will indicate. (I'm attaching a copy of the output of xprop(1), as that is the more interesting of the two.) And they arose after a session in which I made heavy use of the context menu, invoking the "Back" action repeatedly via right-clicking.

These windows are quite annoying, as (1) they are not confined to a single desktop/workspace, (2) they remain on top of all other windows, and (3) they do not repaint, and thus take on the contents of whatever other window goes to the top of the stacking order.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Closing due to the last update to this bug being 5 years old. Please file a new bug if this still applies to recent releases of chromium-browser.