Comment 6 for bug 429858

One other person I talked to who had this problem had it because he was using a local copy of the /usr/bin/compiz script and changes made in compiz required changes in the script otherwise you get this. In your case it looks like the compiz-wrapper package was perhaps not upgraded at the same time as the rest for some reason. As long as you are up-to-date you should not get this problem anymore.

It is certainly still a bug in compiz that putting the 'core' plugin on the command line causes it to crash but since you have to go out of your way to make that happen I'm lowerign the importance of this bug.

Commit that causes the crash: http://git.compiz.org/compiz/core/commit/?h=compiz-0.8&id=20cdf69d096616104cd26fc30c8efd7e4e4e164d

Reverting this commit is not a fix since before that commit instead of crashing compiz would rapidly load/unload the plugin instead causing high CPU usage and a somewhat unresponsive desktop.