Comment 3 for bug 984486

Please forgive my lack of an edited summary, and the fact that I copied-and-pasted a description!

It was the only thing I could do to ensure a bug was filed before killing my machine with the power switch. With compiz crashed I was completely unable to type anything in Firefox although the mouse was functional. Strangely I couldn't even access the TTYs1-6 for a headless login to try and rescue my UI.

Anyway, I had enabled the "static application switcher" via ccsm, tried to resolve key conflicts with unity's switcher, then decided to disable "static application switcher" and restored defaults to the Unity plugin.

Compiz kept crashing when I tried to restart it via gnome-terminal--stderr output included messages about gconf and "invalid directory" as I recall--so apparently it has something to do with invalid settings?

Also I had not restarted my machine after installing updates so I don't know if that left compiz in a fragile state. Hopefully that is the root cause of the issue.