Comment 11 for bug 554106

I had to reinstall Lucid because of this (I'm pretty sure).
I initially turned off the desktop effects to test a bug in compiz. Metacity was enabled, but the appearance dialog hung when I pressed the button to keep the settings. After trying to switch back to using desktop effects (compiz), the hanging still happens, but the settings aren't saved it seems. So apparantly it's possible to disable the desktop effects, even though the dialog hangs when pressing "Keep Settings", but it isn't possible to enable the desktop effects again.
This seemed to work OK in the beginning with metacity, without me being able to switch back to using compiz. But then all of the sudden, after a reboot, the window borders disappeared and gnome-panel as well.
I had noticed that before this happening, alongside metacity, compiz-decorator was running. But after this reboot, when the window border and gnome-panel were gone, compiz-decorator wasn't running in the background any longer.