Comment 10 for bug 363635

Sebastian: I know this is not the kind of bug you like, since it is difficult to describe and hard to reproduce reliably, but it is a real bug. Perhaps the wording of the title could be better, and we need more people to flesh out what is happening. As it stands now, I have absolutely no faith that gnome-screensaver will reliably lock my computer or protect my screen, so I always manually lock my workstation and always shut off my monitor when I am not at it. It's a shame I have to do this.

johnsdagg: Your description in comment #7 was what drew me to this bug report. In my case, I disable gnome-screensaver via the preferences dialog, so I can watch hulu.com uninterrupted. When I am done watching, I re-enable it via the preferences dialog. However, all that happens once the timeout hits is the screen fades as though the screensaver were activating, then it blinks back to the desktop. The screensaver will not properly activate until I right-click on the Lock Screen applet (that I added to my panel) and choose activate screensaver. (A weird thing that happens then is the screensaver activates, but once I move my mouse, it deactivates, but instantly reactivates, no matter how long I waited after it first came on. It does this exactly once per manual activation.) Once I have manually re-activated it, the screensaver seems to behave normally, until the next time I deactivate it. Also, a reboot or logout solves the problem, but that is of course not an acceptable solution.

For me, the problem is pretty repeatable: once I deactivate the screensaver through the preferences dialog, then re-activate it through the preferences dialog, I must manually use the Lock Screen button (either click to lock, or right-click and choose the "Activate screensaver" option to activate the screensaver, but not lock). It does not seem to matter whether I use the blank screensaver or any particular screensaver.

I first noticed this bug after upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 on an x86 machine. I thought it was an upgrade-related bug, so I ignored it. Now I have just done a clean stock install of 10.04 on an amd64 machine, and I have observed the same problem.

Is there anyway to log screensaver events, such as activations and deactivations. Clearly the screensaver is activating, b/c the screen fades to black, but something is immediately signaling it to halt the screensaver instantly as it activates. I would like to find out what event is doing this, so we can fix this bug.