Comment 20 for bug 289241

I can confirm this behavior. It is new in Intrepid, never seen it before.

I have an AMD64 system (Athlon X2 4800, Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe) running Intrepid 8.10 AMD64 edition. It is a fresh install. I had assumed this problem was an unfortunate upgrade artifact of some kind, but alas, it is not.

I am using an EVGA Nvidia 7900GTX-512 GPU and I am using Nvidia's proprietary drivers (v177) on kernel 2.6.27-7.

This bug only occurs when multiple X servers are present on multiple monitors. When running various other X configurations that do not involve multiple X servers (TwinView, etc) this problem is not present.

Any applications launched from any non-primary display either cause this crash behavior (gnome-panel hang at 100% CPU), or launch correctly but on the primary (:0) monitor, NOT on the X server for the monitor where they were launched. The easiest way to get around it is to just create a desktop icon for xterm, and run "killall gnome-panel" after which gnome will bounce back nicely.

This behavior only occurs when accelerated graphics are enabled. Setting graphic acceleration to NONE under System-Preferences-Appearance-VisualEffects instantly resolves this problem, at least on my machine. I suggest this as a workaround for folks having this problem while we wait for this bug to be fixed - that or running under a single X server (not exactly ideal, but it is functional).

I suspect it is a problem that appeared between Gnome 2.22 and 2.24 as multiple X servers in this kind of configuration worked under 2.22, although I do remember a compiz bug that caused wickedly slow drawing of windows and menus on any non-primary X server. Gnome/Compiz have never handled multiple 3D-accelerated X servers well in my experience. That slow draw bug is gone now and this one seems to have replaced it.

I'll see about fishing up a backtrace when I have more time to put into it, probably after the Thanksgiving holiday.