Comment 6 for bug 559056

This sounds similar to the problems that I am having.

Two months ago, I upgraded my Acer laptop to Lucid 10.04, and things haven't been right since.
The screen was badly messed up after the upgrade. I had to find a workaround to even see anything
on the screen. Alas, at this moment I cannot find the kernel setting modeswitch that I did.

The current problem is:
The title bars at the top of windows disappear and workspace switching does not work after
I try to change the number of virtual workspaces. Trying to change the number of workspaces
again produces a flashing window that doesn't set things correctly.
It blows the user interface so bad that I have
to log in with a different identity, and destroy my original account, and then recreate it to
get something usable.

I just reinstalled xwindows, and that didn't fix it either. But it did improve things. Now I can enable "normal" effects in "Appearances", where before I could not. Yesterday, I was getting the error message of
"No rendering method in use -- AIGLX, Xgl, or Nvidia.

Now I have one, and compiz seems sort of happy.

terry2@carmen:~$ compiz-check

Gathering information about your system...

 Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04
 Desktop environment: GNOME
 Graphics chip: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
 Driver in use: intel
 Rendering method: AIGLX

Checking if it's possible to run Compiz on your system...

 Checking for texture_from_pixmap... [ OK ]
 Checking for non power of two support... [ OK ]
 Checking for composite extension... [ OK ]
 Checking for FBConfig... [ OK ]
 Checking for hardware/setup problems... [ OK ]

glxinfo happily reports a whole lot of stuff that says that glx is running, apparently properly.

But still, I cannot change the number of workspaces without destroying things.

I used this script today (run as root) to get rid of old stuff that should have been wiped during the upgrade:

#!/bin/bash
apt-get purge nvidia*
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf

Now, I have "system/appearance/visual effects" at "normal", and that is working, so that is progress.
But still, I don't dare touch the number of workspaces. In fact, If I even try to set worspace/preferences,
I get crashes:

"Window List" has quit unexpectedly.
"Workspace Switcher" has quit unexpectedly.
"Show Desktop" has quit unexpectly.
I click on "reload" and they come back, but things still don't work right.

And when I try to move a window to another workspace by right-clicking on the X in the upper left-hand corner, nothing happens.

I have an Acer Travelmate 2300 with 512MB ram. It only allocated 32MB to video ram. I have read somewhere that that can cause problems.
The video is Intel. lspci says:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)