Task bar mouse pointer gets 'stuck' on arrow-pointing-to-hand

[Steven Flintham]

Sometimes - I'm afraid I don't know precisely what triggers it, I suspect it is an accidental drag over a task bar icon - the mouse pointer shown when hovering over the task bar gets stuck showing "small hand with a small arrow below and to the right of it pointing at the hand" instead of the usual arrow pointer. Once this happens I can't find any way to get back to the normal pointer except using "ALT-F2 r" to restart cinnamon. The pointer is fine over other windows when this happens, it's just over the task bar. I can switch away to a virtual console and back without it making any difference. This seems mostly cosmetic; I can still click on icons on the task bar.

(I probably have the terminology wrong. By "task bar" I mean the bar which shows the names of the open windows; clicking on one of the windows shown on that bar brings that window to the foreground.)

This is with Ubuntu 18.04.1, the cinnamon package is 3.6.7-8ubuntu1.

[Steven Flintham (saf)]

I just had this happen again, and *one* of the window icons on the taskbar can no longer be selected - clicking on it has no effect, while clicking on other window icons does bring them into the foreground. I am not sure if this always happens, just sometimes with a window I haven't tried to bring into the foreground, or if it is intermittent. But in any case, this isn't purely cosmetic after all.

[Steven Flintham (saf)]

I've had a variant on this problem occur just now; the taskbar is now permanently corrupt (it looks like some icon has been stuck half-dragged, not that I was trying to drag anything). I've attached two screenshots; corrupt-taskbar-1.png is when I first noticed this, corrupt-taskbar-2.png is after experimentally dragging some icons on the taskbar to see if it resolved things.