Comment 2 for bug 955390

this was down to POSIX not being enabled and my graphics card drivers:

I added the line:

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

to /etc/fstab as it was missing

and then mounted the shared memory:

sudo mount /dev/shm

Reference: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1393513

i have purged my AMD driver and downloaded the latest driver from the ati website:

sudo apt-get --purge remove fglrx*
sudo apt-get install dh-make execstack dh-modaliases dkms lib32gcc1 libc6-i386
sudo chmod +x amd-driver-installer-12-2-x86.x86_64.run
sudo sh amd-driver-installer-12-2-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/precise

Reference: http://debianhelp.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/to-do-list-after-installing-ubuntu-12-04-lts-aka-precise-pangolin/

now I have 3d graphics and no menu drop issues